US announces naval coalition to defend Red Sea shipping from Houthi attacks
Egypt and Saudi Arabia notably absent from Operation Prosperity Guardian as more shipping companies forgo route
From The Guardian
Photograph: Yorkshire Lass/Stockimo/Alamy
The US has announced the creation of an enhanced naval protection force operating in the southern Red Sea in an attempt to ward off mounting attacks from Yemen’s rebel Houthis on merchant shipping.
Britain said it would be among the countries participating but notable absentees were Arab nations Egypt and Saudi Arabia, while analysts speculated that shipping would continue to be disrupted and attacks continue.
Lloyd Austin, the US defence secretary, said the new effort would be called Operation Prosperity Guardian and was necessary to tackle the “recent escalation in reckless Houthi attacks originating from Yemen”.
Other participants in the effort, Austin said, included Bahrain, Canada, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Seychelles and Spain.
But it was not clear it had any immediate impact on securing the strategic waterway, through which an estimated 50 merchant ships normally pass each day, heading to and from the Suez canal, often transiting between Asia and Europe.
Danish company Møller–Maersk said on Tuesday it would reroute ships around Africa and the Cape of Good Hope, a journey that takes 10 or more days longer, and that it would continue to monitor the situation closely.
“We have faith that a solution enabling a return to using the Suez Canal and transiting through the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden will be introduced in the near future, but at this time it remains difficult to determine exactly when this will be,” Maersk added.
Other shipping companies have previously announced they would halt or reroute traffic, including British oil firm BP, Hong Kong’s OOCL, Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd and the Italian-Swiss-owned Mediterranean Shipping Co.
Yemen’s Houthis, who are aligned with Iran, have been eager to show support for Hamas in Gaza, and began by trying to mount long-range missile attacks into Israel. But these were largely intercepted by Saudi Arabia and the US and had no impact.
Tactics switched dramatically a month ago, when the Houthi fighters dramatically seized the Galaxy Leader, a British-owned and Japanese-operated cargo ship, in a helicopter raid captured on video. It remains in the Yemeni port of Hodeidah.
But while the Houthis initially said they were seeking to target Israeli shipping, they have stepped up their attacks on a wide variety of merchant tankers heading through and towards the 18-mile-wide Bab el-Mandeb strait.https://interactive.guim.co.uk/uploader/embed/2023/12/red-sea-attacks-map/giv-134250eML1nXQKse4/
On Monday, the US military said that the Swan Atlantic tanker was attacked by a drone and an anti-ship ballistic missile launched from a Houthi-controlled areas in Yemen. Its Norwegian owners reported limited damage to the ship, and no injuries to its crew, and the vessel continued sailing under US naval protection.
On Saturday, the USS Carney, a destroyer already patrolling in the Red Sea, shot down 14 Houthi one-way attack drones. French and British warships have also shot down drones in the Red Sea area in the past week.
Britain said it would contribute HMS Diamond, a destroyer, alongside three US destroyers to Operation Prosperity Guardian, after a morning call of 20 international defence ministers led by Austin.
“The government is working with the US, France and other international allies to provide significant deterrence to prevent attacks on free shipping that would affect free trade,” said a spokesperson for the UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak. “I think it is right the government is acting early alongside our allies to significantly step up the deterrents to curb these attacks.”
One analyst, Farea Al-Muslimi from the Chatham House thinktank, said they expected the Houthi attacks to continue for now despite the US announcement – and that commercial shipping was likely to remain wary of using the Red Sea.
“The Houthis will carry on, they love attention and they have a wide degree of support in the Arab world,” Al-Muslimi said. “So far nobody has died as a result of the Houthi attacks – if somebody is killed then there will likely have to be a response.”
But the maritime security effort is weakened, Al-Muslimi added, by the absence of either Egypt or Saudi Arabia, unable to sign up to the coalition because of heightened concerns in the Arab world about Israel’s intense bombing of Gaza, and Washington’s support for Israel.
A further tension is how to protect commercial shipping without escalating the conflict to the point where the US and allies are bombing Yemen to suppress the Red Sea attacks, because, Al-Muslimi said, “the US doesn’t want to make another frontline with the Houthis”.
At the same time negotiations between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia to halt their long-running war remain at a delicate point. Peace talks brokered by Oman had been running during 2023, but the outbreak of the war in Gaza had already made progress uncertain before the attacks on merchant shipping began a month ago.
Additional reporting by Aletha Adu
Trump sparks Republican backlash after saying immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood’ of the U.S.
The GOP criticism came in the Senate, including from Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and on the 2024 campaign trail.
WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump is facing criticism from Republican lawmakers following his comments over the weekend that immigrants coming to the U.S. are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
“It strikes me that it didn’t bother him when he appointed Elaine Chao secretary of transportation,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Tuesday. McConnell is married to Chao, who immigrated to the U.S. from Taiwan as a child.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, called the comments “horrible.”
“I thought that was horrible, that those comments are — just have no place, particularly from a former president,” she told reporters. “So they’re deplorable.”
Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., added that he disagrees with Trump’s “unacceptable rhetoric.”
“I think that that rhetoric is very inappropriate, but this administration’s policies are feeding right into it. And so I disagree with that. I think we should celebrate our diversity,” said Rounds, who had endorsed Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., for president before he dropped out.
“But unfortunately, that type of rhetoric is what happens when you don’t have a border policy that works. And it just simply feeds that type of poor, unacceptable rhetoric,” he added.
Asked about the Republican criticism, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said the former president “has by far the most Senate endorsements in this race, people who are fighters and want to Make America Great Again.”
Trump‘s remarks took place at a speech in New Hampshire on Saturday, and he has since doubled down on them in a Truth Social post.
“They let — I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country. When they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump said Saturday. “That’s what they’ve done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America, not just to three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world. They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”
The former president doubled down on the remark at a campaign event in Waterloo, Iowa, on Tuesday night. Referring to illegal border crossings, Trump repeatedly said “They are destroying the blood of our country.”
Presidential candidate and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie used Trump’s earlier comment as ammunition to target his rival.
“He’s disgusting, and what he’s doing is dog-whistling to Americans who feel absolutely under stress and strain from the economy and from the conflicts around the world, and he’s dog-whistling it to blame it on people from areas that don’t look like us,” Christie said on CNN.
The GOP criticism comes after the Biden campaign quickly compared Trump’s comments to Adolf Hitler, who also used “blood poisoning” language in his manifesto “Mein Kampf.”
Biden campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa said over the weekend that Trump “channeled his role models as he parroted Adolf Hitler, praised Kim Jong Un, and quoted Vladimir Putin while running for president on a promise to rule as a dictator and threaten American democracy.”
Trump brushed off the criticism on Tuesday, saying “I never read Mein Kampf.”
Some Republicans have been dismissive of the criticism surrounding Trump’s comments.
“We’re talking about language. I could care less what language people use as long as we get it right,” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Similarly, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis of New York defended Trump in a CNN interview, arguing that she thinks he was “talking about the Democratic policies.”
“I know that some are trying to make it seem like President Trump is, is anti-immigrant,” Malliotakis said. “The reality is, he was married to immigrants, he’s hired immigrants.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a presidential candidate, did not condemn the comments in a clip aired Monday by Fox News.
“I don’t know what this means with the blood stuff,” DeSantis said. “I know people are trying to draw historical allusions. I don’t know if that’s what he meant.”
In Iceland, a Fiery Show of Lava and Smoke
Icelanders had been girding for an eruption. When it happened, they wanted to see it.
From The New York Times
By Egill Bjarnason and Jenny Gross
Egill Bjarnason reported from Iceland, and Jenny Gross reported from Britain.
Published Dec. 19, 2023Updated Dec. 20, 2023, 1:10 a.m. ET
Pall Viggosson, a tour guide in Iceland, was driving a van carrying nine British tourists on Monday night in search of the northern lights. But instead of the greenish glow of the aurora borealis, he saw red — flames and smoke from a volcanic eruption that Iceland had been uneasily awaiting.
The area, the Reykjanes Peninsula, had been experiencing strong seismic activity since October, a harbinger of an imminent eruption. The earthquakes — there were as many as 1,400 in a single 24-hour period in November — prompted the evacuation of the town of Grindavik and the temporary closing of the Blue Lagoon, a top tourist attraction. With these shaky warnings, Icelanders were girding for the eruption that came Monday night.
“I realized quickly this was no ordinary light pollution,” Mr. Viggosson said. He pulled over on the highway so the tourists could take photos.
Soon, the highway, which connects the capital to Keflavik International Airport, became busy, as other curious spectators drove from Reykjavik and nearby towns to catch a glimpse of the spectacle for themselves: reddish and orange skies, billowing smoke and lava fountains reaching over 300 feet into the air.
“Against the mountains the flames were huge, and the fissure length grew larger and larger,” Mr. Viggosson said.
One of the spectators was Bjorn Steinbekk, the head of a marketing and consulting company, who left his Reykjavik home as soon as he heard about the eruption on Monday night. Using a drone, he captured footage of the lava shooting into the sky. Even for someone who has chased many eruptions in the last two years, “last night was a whole new chapter from anything we’ve seen before,” Mr. Steinbekk said. “It was much more violent for two or three hours, with bigger strokes and a lot of lava coming out.”
Iceland is prone to volcanic activity. It straddles two tectonic plates, which are divided by an undersea mountain chain that oozes molten hot rock, or magma. But the Reykjanes volcanic system in southwestern Iceland had been dormant for 800 years. In the last few years, however, magma began to gather under the surface.
José Alvarado, a pilot with the low-cost Icelandic airline Play, got a view of the eruption from the cockpit of his plane. He described what he saw as a big glow.
“The amount of light you got through the clouds was pretty amazing — it was completely red,” said Mr. Alvarado, who was flying to Reykjavik from Lisbon. Once he heard from air traffic control that the eruption would not produce ash clouds and therefore posed no risk, he gave passengers an update and suggested they look out of the right side of the aircraft for a view.
By 2 a.m. on Tuesday, the eruption had started easing. By later on Tuesday, lava was spewing at a much lower intensity, Mr. Steinbekk said, speaking from near the eruption, as he prepared to launch his drone to get more footage.
Kjartan Adolfsson, an accountant living in Grindavik, a town of more than 3,500, evacuated with other residents last month after heightened seismic activity prompted concerns that an eruption was imminent. The eruption on Monday was “uncomfortably close to town,” he said, although he was relieved that the lava was flowing away from Grindavik.
For weeks, Mr. Adolfsson, 59, said, he had been bracing for the worst. He said that the first time he had to evacuate because of an eruption was 50 years ago. His parents woke him up in the middle of the night at their home on the island of Heimaey, Iceland’s largest island settlement. They packed quickly and sailed away from the town, only to find out later that their home had been destroyed by lava.
The local authorities have not yet indicated when Grindavik will be safe enough for residents to return. Almost everyone had evacuated at the time of the eruption.
Stefan Kristjansson, who owns several fishing boats, was unwinding in his outdoor hot tub in Grindavik on Monday night when he saw the horizon light up. He quickly got dressed, left some food out for his sheep and drove to Reykjavik. “I would like to be back before Christmas,” he said.
Westminster Board of Health wants to hear from residents in wake of PFAS contamination
From The Gardner News
By Emilia Cardona, The Gardner News,1 day ago
The Westminster Board of Health will be voting on Wednesday, Dec. 20, whether or not to extend the well moratorium that began in August 2022.
In preparation for that meeting, the Board of Health held a public hearing on Wednesday, Dec. 6, for residents to express their concerns about the moratorium, which was put in place after the discovery of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) contaminating residential wells in February 2022.
Since August 2022, the well moratorium has been renewed three times already. The current well moratorium expires on Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2024, and the Board of Health plans to decide on one of three options on Dec. 20.
What does the moratorium cover?
The moratorium temporarily prevents drilling new wells in the defined area of impact. As a result, the Board of Health prohibited any new private wells from being drilled in the PFAS-contaminated area.
In the past two years, over 250 private drinking wells in the land surrounding Massachusetts Natural Fertilizer at 65 Bean Porridge Hill Road in Westminster have been contaminated by PFAS. The contamination leaked from piles of compost materials at the fertilizer facility; as of Dec. 6, 180 Point of Entry filtration systems have been installed.
Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) determined the contaminated area might change in the next two to three years due to Comprehensive Site Assessment activities, including drilling testing wells to gather ground and surface water samples.
What are the three options?
The Board of Health can vote on three potential outcomes for the soon-to-expire well moratorium. Edward Simoncini, the Board of Health chair, said the hearing is not required, but because this issue is such a controversial topic in town, he wanted to hear residents’ concerns and opinions.
The first option, Simoncini said, is that the board doesn’t vote and lets the moratorium expire, which means the language and procedure to get a well drilling permit stays the same as it was before the PFAS contamination discovery.
The second option is to renew the moratorium, which means extending the temporary prohibition of drilling new wells.
The third option is to lift the moratorium and establish new language that changes the procedure to obtain a drilling permit. If the board votes for the third option, any well drilling application within the contaminated area must include a Licensed Site Professional and submission of a DEP-approved Release Abatement Measure plan to the Board of Health.
This Winchendon, MA based Cat is the latest up for adoption and in need of a good home
From News Break
Have you been contemplating pet adoption, or simply love perusing adorable pets? A myriad of delightful pets are available for adoption at various animal shelters in the vicinity of winchendon..
Animal shelters and pet rescue groups work hard to care for unhoused pets and connect them to loving homes.
Boyd
Photo from petfinder
Name: Boyd
Species: Domestic Short Hair
Info: Cat, Male, Young, Medium
Location: Winchendon, MA, 01475
Description: Boyd is just the sweetest 1 year old boy. He loves to talk and just wants to be with you…. Click to see more
Every small creature longs for a caring environment. If you’ve made the compassionate decision to welcome them into your life, simply follow the adoption process outlined in the link contained within this article. We deeply appreciate your kindness towards these vulnerable animals.
