By SAM MEDNICK, Associated Press

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — The Gaza Strip will likely fall into famine if Israel doesn’t lift its blockade and stop its military campaign, food security experts said in a stark warning on Monday.

Nearly half a million Palestinians are facing possible starvation, living in “catastrophic” levels of hunger, and 1 million others can barely get enough food, according to findings by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a leading international authority on the severity of hunger crises.

The group said “there is a high risk” of outright famine if circumstances don’t change.

Israel has banned all food, shelter, medicine and any other goods from entering the Palestinian territory for the past 10 weeks, even as it carries out waves of airstrikes and ground operations. Gaza’s population of around 2.3 million people relies almost entirely on outside aid to survive, because Israel’s 19-month-old military campaign has wiped away most capacity to produce food inside the territory.

Desperate scenes as food is running out

Food supplies are emptying out dramatically. Communal kitchens handing out cooked meals are virtually the only remaining source of food for most people in Gaza now, but they too are rapidly shutting down for lack of stocks.

Thousands of Palestinians crowd daily outside the public kitchens, pushing and jostling with their pots to receive lentils or pasta.

“We end up waiting in line for four, five hours, in the sun. It is exhausting,” said Riham Sheikh el-Eid, waiting at a kitchen in the southern city of Khan Younis on Sunday. “At the end, we walk away with nothing. It is not enough for everybody.”

The lack of a famine declaration doesn’t mean people aren’t already starving, and a declaration shouldn’t be a precondition for ending the suffering, said Chris Newton, an analyst for the International Crisis Group focusing on starvation as a weapon of war.

“The Israeli government is starving Gaza as part of its attempt to destroy Hamas and transform the strip,” he said.

Israel demands a new aid system

The office of Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, did not respond to a request for comment. The army has said that enough assistance entered Gaza during a two-month ceasefire that Israel shattered in mid-March when it relaunched its military campaign.

Israel says the blockade aims to pressure Hamas to release the hostages it still holds. It says it won’t let aid back in until a new system giving it control over distribution is in place, accusing Hamas of siphoning off supplies. The United States says it is working up a new mechanism that will start deliveries soon, but it has given no timeframe.

The United Nations has so far refused to participate. It denies substantial diversion of aid is taking place and says the new system is unnecessary, will not meet the massive needs of Palestinians and will allow aid to be used as a weapon for political and military goals.

Monday’s report said that any slight gains made during the ceasefire have been reversed. Nearly the entire population of Gaza now faces high levels of hunger, it said, driven by conflict, the collapse of infrastructure, destruction of agriculture, and blockades of aid.

Mahmoud Alsaqqa, food security and livelihoods coordinator for Oxfam, called on governments to press Israel to allow “unimpeded humanitarian access.”

“Silence in the face of this manmade starvation is complicity,” he said.

Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas after the group’s Oct. 7, 2023, surprise attack on Israel, in which militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 251 hostage, most of whom have been released in ceasefire agreements or other deals.

Israel’s offensive has killed over 52,000 Palestinians, more than half of them women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, whose count does not distinguish between civilians or combatants.

Three criteria for declaring famine

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, first set up in 2004 during the famine in Somalia, groups more than a dozen U.N. agencies, aid groups, governments and other bodies.

It has only declared famine a few times — in Somalia in 2011, and South Sudan in 2017 and 2020, and last year in parts of Sudan’s western Darfur region. Tens of thousands are believed to have died in Somalia and South Sudan.

It rates an area as in famine when at least two of three things occur: 20% of households have an extreme lack of food, or are essentially starving; at least 30% of children six months to five years suffer from acute malnutrition or wasting, meaning they’re too thin for their height; and at least two people or four children under five per every 10,000 are dying daily due to starvation or the interaction of malnutrition and disease.

The assessment on Monday found that the first threshold was met in Gaza, saying 477,000 people — or 22% of the population — are classified as in “catastrophic” hunger, the highest level, for the period from May 11 to the end of September.

It said more than 1 million people are at “emergency” levels of hunger, the second highest level, meaning they have “very high gaps” in food and high acute malnutrition.

The other thresholds were not met. The data was gathered in April and up to May 6. Food security experts say it takes time for people to start dying from starvation.

The report said if the blockade and military campaign continues, “the vast majority” in Gaza will not have access to food or water, civil unrest will worsen, health services will “fully collapse,” disease will spread, and levels of malnutrition and death will cross the thresholds into famine.

It had also warned of “imminent” famine in northern Gaza in March 2024, but the following month, Israel allowed an influx of aid under U.S. pressure after an Israeli strike killed seven aid workers.

Aid groups now say the situation is the most dire of the entire war. The U.N. humanitarian office, known as OCHA, said Friday that the number of children seeking treatment at clinics for malnutrition has doubled since February, even as supplies to treat them are quickly running out.

Aid groups have shut down food distribution for lack of stocks. Many foods have disappeared from the markets and what’s left has spiraled in price and is unaffordable to most. Farmland is mostly destroyed or inaccessible. Water distribution is grinding to a halt, largely because of lack of fuel.

Beth Bechdol, deputy director of the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, said more than 75% of Gaza’s farmland had been damaged or destroyed, and two-thirds of the wells used for irrigation were no longer operating.

The destruction, she said, is “driving these large numbers of people closer towards the famine numbers that we think are possible.”

AP correspondents Wafaa Shurafa in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, Samy Magdy in Cairo and Sarah El Deeb in Beirut contributed to this report.

By MICHAEL R. SISAK and LARRY NEUMEISTER, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — Federal prosecutors will begin trying to prove Monday that Sean “Diddy” Combs turned his hip-hop conglomerate into a racketeering enterprise that forced women to satisfy his sexual desires for two decades.

Testimony in Combs’ New York trial could begin as soon as the afternoon following a final phase of jury selection in the morning and opening statements from the lawyers.

Combs, 55, has pleaded not guilty to a five-count indictment that could land him in prison for at least 15 years if he is convicted on all charges. He has been imprisoned at a federal jail in Brooklyn since his arrest in September.

Lawyers for the three-time Grammy winner say prosecutors are wrongly trying to make a crime out of a party-loving lifestyle that may have been indulgent, but was not illegal.

Prosecutors say Combs coerced women into drugged-up group sexual encounters, then kept them in line through violence. He is accused of choking, hitting, kicking and dragging women, often by the hair.

Combs’ former girlfriend, the R&B singer Cassie, is expected to be among the trial’s early witnesses.

She filed a lawsuit in 2023 saying Combs had subjected her to years of abuse, including beatings and rape. The lawsuit was settled within hours of its filing, but it touched off a law enforcement investigation and was followed by dozens of lawsuits from people making similar claims.

Prosecutors plan to show jurors video a security camera video of Combs beating Cassie in the hallway of a Los Angeles hotel in 2016.

Jurors may also see recordings of events called “Freak Offs,” where prosecutors say women had sex with male sex workers while Combs filmed them. The indictment said the events sometimes lasted days and participants required IV-drips to recover.

Combs’ attorney, Marc Agnifilo, has said that the Bad Boy Records founder was “not a perfect person” and was undergoing therapy, including for drug use, before his arrest.

But he and other lawyers for Combs have argued that any group sex was consensual and any violence was an aberration.

After the video of Combs assaulting Cassie in the hotel aired on CNN last year, Combs apologized and said he took “full responsibility” for his actions. “I was disgusted then when I did it. I’m disgusted now.”

The Associated Press doesn’t generally identify people who say they are victims of sexual abuse unless they come forward publicly, as Cassie, whose legal name is Casandra Ventura, has done.

The trial is expected to last at least eight weeks.

It’s the sort of day where you can tell that the state Capitol is bustling with civic activity well before you pass through the security checkpoints. Even by 10 o’clock this sunny March morning, the main parking garage is full. Charter buses, which carried Texans to their capital city from destinations hundreds of miles away, are parked all along the streets. 

On almost every one of the 140 days that the Texas Legislature meets for its biennial session, citizens make the pilgrimage to the pink granite-domed Capitol to engage in activism, persuasion, and admonition. Sometimes they are there of their own individual democratic volition; more often they mobilize on behalf of an organized advocacy group. 

Demonstrators march and gather near the Capitol following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June 2022. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)

The marquee event is the Texas House Public Education Committee’s hearing on House Bill 3, the lower chamber’s proposed school voucher program. It’s a historic day as a school voucher bill is on track to pass through the House for the first time ever. For the hundreds of pro-“school choice” Texans who’ve traveled there to provide a show of mass popular support, it’s a joyous occasion. For the hundreds of opponents—public school teachers, parents, and other activists who’ve shown up to voice their urgent rebukes—it’s an ominous one. 

The Capitol Extension, an underground complex that sits below the north grounds, first opened back in 1993, nearly doubling the building’s square footage. Here there are 16 committee hearing rooms, conference rooms, an auditorium, a gift shop, and, of course, the popular Capitol Grill cafeteria, which this day is serving frito pies, loaded baked potatoes, and other standard fare.

This is the hive. The cavernous hallways, with terrazzo floors that mirror those in the Capitol proper, and the four-story inverted rotunda are filled with a constant stream of people wandering in large groups, or beelining for a destination—like a shopping mall of democracy. 

Pro-immigrant protesters outside the Texas Capitol in 2017 (Sam DeGrave)

The professionals are easy to pick out from the unwashed masses, who are often all wearing the same colored t-shirts with matching slogans. The lawmakers, dressed in sharp suits or fitted dresses, are often walking briskly with a small entourage of staffers. The lobbyists, typically wearing far more expensive attire, are often the ones sitting on the benches that line the hallways—glued to their phones. On this day, Governor Greg Abbott’s former top aide, now one of the most sought-after lobbyists in Austin, is in an alcove wearing earbuds. 

In the auditorium, about 100 home-schooling families are listening to the Texas Home School Coalition go through a legislative primer on their top priority this session: House Joint Resolution 155, a constitutional amendment to enshrine the right to homeschool in the Texas Constitution. “Freedom is fragile,” Jeremy Newman, the coalition’s vice president of policy, tells the crowd. “We know this because home schooling was illegal in the ’70s and ’80s. We know people now who were in jail because of this.” 

The group has to wrap up its briefing early, apparently so as not to interfere with the governor’s own pro-voucher press event, which is being held at the swanky downtown office of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. With that, the crowd takes their packet of information flyers, streams out of the auditorium, and into the maze of hallways that contain legislators’ offices. 

Pro-Palestine demonstrators ride horses just south of the Capitol in February 2024 (Gus Bova)

Around this time, the Texas Freedom Network is leading an anti-voucher rally on the south steps of the Capitol—the designated area for sanctioned rallies, protests, and press conferences. The granite stairs include a natural “riser” that makes for a perfect stage. For an hourly electricity fee of $35, organizers can plug in their microphones and speakers. For a $50 fee, the State Preservation Board—which is responsible for maintaining all activities on the grounds—can provide a lectern or chairs. 

Shortly after the anti-voucher rally, the gun nuts gather around the south side for a rally to push back against the tyranny of so-called red flag laws in Texas and across the nation. A few dozen members of the Gun Owners of America are in attendance, many donning little red flags attached to their caps. Among the VIP attendees there to help rally the troops are tea party firebrand and Dallas County GOP Chair Allen West, plus Kyle Rittenhouse, who moved to Texas a few years ago after becoming a celebrity in the gun rights movement. The event is sponsored by Patriot Mobile, the premier cell-phone carrier for conservatives and an ardent booster of Christian nationalist politics in Texas. 

Alas, much of what may appear to be grassroots advocacy is in reality heavily engineered. But there is plenty of more organic citizen engagement too. When encountered, it can serve as a much needed salve for the cynicism that comes from closely following the Texas Legislature. 

Family members of those killed in the Robb Elementary School shooting carry a Day of the Dead altar from the Capitol to the Governor’s Mansion in November 2022. (Gus Bova)

Consider Nicholas Gresham, the operator of a small hemp business in East Texas. It’s also a lobby day for the Texas Cannabis Collective. He’s here today to push lawmakers to vote against one of the Senate’s top priorities—Senate Bill 3—that would outright ban any THC products in the state. 

When he heard that the Senate was holding a public hearing on the bill a couple weeks earlier, he felt compelled to leave his wife and newborn in the NICU at a Dallas hospital to drive to Austin to testify. Before the committee, he chastised lawmakers for trying to pull the rug out from under a burgeoning legal hemp industry. 

He came back again on Tuesday to drop off pro-hemp leaflets at legislators’ offices. For him, it’s a matter of protecting his livelihood. (The baby, by the way, is home and healthy now.)

Gresham may not be a high-powered lobbyist who can easily text with or wine-and-dine legislators. And much of his literature may likely end up in the recycling bin at the end of the day. But everyday Texans like him, who have something personal on the line, are essential to each and every legislative session. And you can count on them to keep showing up. 

The post  A Day in a Democracy appeared first on The Texas Observer.

By AMANDA SEITZ and WILL WEISSERT, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s plan to change the pricing model for some medications is already facing fierce criticism from the pharmaceutical industry before he’s even signed the executive order set for Monday that, if implemented, could lower the cost of some drugs.

Trump has promised that his plan — which is likely to tie the price of medications covered by Medicare and administered in a doctor’s office to the lowest price paid by other countries — will significantly lower drug costs.

“I will be instituting a MOST FAVORED NATION’S POLICY whereby the United States will pay the same price as the Nation that pays the lowest price anywhere in the World,” the Republican president posted on social media on Sunday, pledging to sign the order on Monday morning at the White House.

But the nation’s leading pharmaceutical lobby on Sunday pushed back, calling it a “bad deal” for American patients. Drugmakers have long argued that any threats to their profits could impact the research they do to develop new drugs.

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“Importing foreign prices will cut billions of dollars from Medicare with no guarantee that it helps patients or improves their access to medicines,” Stephen J. Ubl, the president and CEO of PhRMA, said in a statement. “It jeopardizes the hundreds of billions our member companies are planning to invest in America, making us more reliant on China for innovative medicines.”

Trump’s so-called “most favored nation” approach to Medicare drug pricing has been controversial since he first tried to implement it during his first term. He signed a similar executive order in the final weeks of his presidency, but a court order later blocked the rule from going into effect under President Joe Biden’s administration.

The pharmaceutical industry has argued that Trump’s 2020 attempt would give foreign governments the “upper hand” in deciding the value of medicines in the U.S.

It’s likely that Trump’s executive order Monday will only impact drugs covered by Medicare Part B, the insurance for doctor’s office visits. Medicare beneficiaries are responsible for picking up some of the costs to get those medications during doctor’s visits, and for traditional Medicare enrollees there is no annual out-of-pocket cap on what they pay.

A report by the first Trump administration found that the U.S. spends twice as much as some other countries in covering those drugs. Medicare Part B drug spending topped $33 billion in 2021.

Trump has played up the announcement, saying it will save taxpayers big money.

“Our Country will finally be treated fairly, and our citizens Healthcare Costs will be reduced by numbers never even thought of before,” Trump added.

But many Americans won’t see the savings.

Trump’s proposal would likely only impact certain drugs covered by Medicare and given in an office — think infusions that treat cancer, and other injectables. But it could potentially bring billions of dollars in savings to the government — not necessarily the “TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS” Trump boasted about in his post.

Medicare provides health insurance for roughly 70 million older Americans. Complaints about U.S. drug prices being notoriously high, even when compared with other large and wealthy countries, have long drawn the ire of both major political parties, but a lasting fix has never cleared Congress.

More common prescription drugs filled at a pharmacy would probably not be covered by the new order.

Trump’s post formally previewing the action came after he teased a “very big announcement” last week. He gave no details, except to note that it wasn’t related to trade or the tariffs he has announced for much of the world.

“We’re going to have a very, very big announcement to make — like as big as it gets,” Trump said last week.

He came into his first term accusing pharmaceutical companies of “getting away with murder” and complaining that other countries whose governments set drug prices were taking advantage of Americans.

On Sunday, Trump took aim at the industry again, writing that the “Pharmaceutical/Drug Companies would say, for years, that it was Research and Development Costs, and that all of these costs were, and would be, for no reason whatsoever, borne by the ‘suckers’ of America, ALONE.”

Referring to drug companies’ powerful lobbying efforts, he said that campaign contributions “can do wonders, but not with me, and not with the Republican Party.”

“We are going to do the right thing,” he wrote.