PhilipTheBucket

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Which is fine as far as it goes, yet does very little if anything to address the body of the above concerns.

What? Of course it does. A near-unanimous consensus by experts in the field is worth more than whatever you are bringing up in your Lemmy comment.

I mean, it would be possible to lay out logic so compelling that even if experts in the field felt one particular way about it you could make a case otherwise, but weird strawmen like wanting archaeological evidence of Jesus's specific skeleton or something is not that.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social 10 points 3 weeks ago (20 children)

In a 2011 review of the state of modern scholarship, Bart D. Ehrman wrote, "He certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees."[13] Richard A. Burridge states: "There are those who argue that Jesus is a figment of the Church's imagination, that there never was a Jesus at all. I have to say that I do not know any respectable critical scholar who says that any more."[14] Robert M. Price does not believe that Jesus existed but agrees that this perspective runs against the views of the majority of scholars.[15] James D. G. Dunn calls the theories of Jesus's non-existence "a thoroughly dead thesis".[16] Michael Grant (a classicist), "In recent years, 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non historicity of Jesus' or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary."[17] Robert E. Van Voorst states that biblical scholars and classical historians regard theories of non-existence of Jesus as effectively refuted.[18] Writing on The Daily Beast, Candida Moss and Joel Baden state that, "there is nigh universal consensus among biblical scholars – the authentic ones, at least – that Jesus was, in fact, a real guy."[19]

[–] PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social 2 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

Plus when I looked up a few terms I had never heard of they were being used in places like the department of labour publications

Interesting, which terms?

Most modern scholars think that none of the gospels were written by eyewitnesses.

It's a little bit academic (har har) anyway, since they all went through so many layers of translation often by people with specific agendas that the modern English versions can't really claim to be "authentic" to the originals anyway, but regardless of that they almost certainly weren't written by those specific disciples of Jesus (even if you accept the events described in them as semi-authentic.)

[–] PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social 20 points 3 weeks ago

Bro it's like sooooooo unfair that you don't want to just chill, man

Mans is severely out of his league, all surprised that geopolitics isn't like his high school

[–] PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social 2 points 3 weeks ago (6 children)

democrat activists

Sus

Also, the article is clearly referencing this think-tank paper that was aimed at "democrat politicians," not "democrat activists."

[–] PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social 17 points 3 weeks ago

This man is a board certified turbo nerd. I very much like for example his succinct explanation of NixOS, with concrete examples of what it makes easy that can be remarkably difficult on other distros sometimes, and how he likes to time his arrival in meetings so that he comes in exactly on the second that the meeting starts (I actually used to do the same with meetings that I was running, setting the clocks if I needed to so that their second hands were accurate.)

Also: "People will use screen sometimes, if they're very old." 😃

[–] PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social 6 points 3 weeks ago (8 children)

The point is, no one in the Democratic party was actually doing any of the things they listed. Like literally 0 people in 0 emails, for most of them, and then a tiny handful of them had been used once or something.

Yes, I agree that "Latinx" is stupid and that Latinos specifically feel that way overwhelmingly. The point is that they're creating an artificial reality wherein all these mainstream Democratic politicians are saying "Latinx," when pretty much none of them are.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social 13 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)
[–] PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social 9 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

That's fucking wild

[–] PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social 32 points 3 weeks ago

Well this is sure going to go well lol

OP: On the off chance that you are sincere about this: The modern Trump administration is snatching random people including citizens off the streets and stuffing them in extra-judicial hellholes where they sometimes die and sometimes get ejected from the country to God knows where, without the semblance of due process that "deported" would imply. For no other reason than that Trump and Stephen Miller wanted them to be punished. He's also claiming that making fun of him on TV is illegal and that attacking American cities with the US military is fine. He was close friends with Epstein and, apparently, raped several children. Any person with even a shred of deceny or law abiding nature is going to hate him and everything he stands for.

If you're not on board for that stuff, then I think you should say so. I have some isolated views that someone could call "conservative" (certainly in Lemmy's overton window), it is fine, in the abstract. But in the modern US political environment, calling yourself "conservative" is a death sentence for your credibility. Certainly if you're not going out of your way to say that you're not on board for all that (probably even then).

If you're just trolling, then fine, good luck with it. If you don't think that Trump is actually doing any of those things, come to !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world and let's talk. But if you want to make a conservative community on Lemmy, and your idea is to be pro-Trump in any way, I think people are just going to laugh at you.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social 55 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (25 children)

I have studied this topic academically, a little bit. My answer:

  1. The people who wrote the old testament lived in a world that was almost unfathomably dangerous and difficult compared to today's first world. Death, disease, starvation, natural disasters, the collapse of whole towns and settlements, unexplained daily suffering for which there is not even an explanation let alone a cure, were constantly present. If you're in that place, and you believe there's a God who's in charge of it all, there is absolutely no conclusion to come to other than he's a real son of a bitch.
  2. I definitely believe that Jesus had some kind of genuine religious inspiration, that a lot of what he was teaching was for-real insight about life. The stuff about forgiving your enemies, living for good works through action and how it really doesn't matter what you say or what team you're on, trying to build a better life by caring about people around you, taking care of the sick and injured, even if they are beggars or prostitutes or foreigners or otherwise "bad" people in your mind simply because of their circumstances, seems pretty spot on to me. It was 100% at odds with the religion of the day, pretty much as much as it is with modern religion. What Jesus actually said does obviously have "spiritual" and supernatural elements also, but it is also focused to a huge extent on what you as an individual can do, and a sort of alignment towards the greater good and a calling for humanity, as opposed to this wild half-Pagan mythology about a capricious and bad-tempered God who might kill you at any instant.
 

Seg1 epstein3

Amid growing pressure for the Trump administration to release the full Jeffrey Epstein files, a New York Times investigation reveals how the country’s largest bank, JPMorgan Chase, enabled Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation and profited from its ties to him. The exposé is based on more than 13,000 pages of legal and financial records. The Times reports JPMorgan processed more than 4,700 transactions for Epstein totaling more than $1.1 billion, including payments to some of the women who were sexually trafficked. The bank “arranged for Epstein to be able to pay those victims, both in the U.S. and in Eastern European countries and in Russia,” says David Enrich, deputy investigations editor for The New York Times. Epstein “operated in large part because he had unfettered access to the global financial system. And for many years, it was JPMorgan that was providing him with that access.”

 

A man sits near a damaged building in Afghanistan after a magnitude 6.0 earthquake in Afghanistan

An earthquake in Afghanistan killed over 2,200 people last Sunday, with some rural villages still unreachable by rescuers. | Wakil Kohsar/AFP

By the time the earthquake struck, flattening mud-brick homes across Afghanistan’s eastern mountains last week, many nearby health clinics had already been shuttered for months.

Mushtaq Khan, a senior advisor for the International Rescue Committee, felt his building jolt from all the way in the capital, Kabul, on Sunday night. He woke the next morning to a horrifying death toll slowly trickling in. First, 200 lives lost; then 500; 800; 1,000; and finally, by Thursday, there were over 2,200 confirmed deaths, with some rural villages still unreachable by rescuers.

As his team searched for survivors, he wondered what could have happened if the gutting of the US Agency for International Development hadn’t forced four of their clinics in the country’s hardest-hit province to close earlier this year, cutting off 60,000 rural Afghans from care.

How many lives could be saved if the emergency aid came rushing in like it did before? If the roads had been built in time, or if the food assistance was at the ready like it used to be, they could have surely reached more people more quickly in the disaster’s wake.

“The way we are responding now would’ve been way different,” he said.At the beginning of this year, the US cut almost $1.8 billion worth of aid to Afghanistan. Because of those cuts alone, the country’s GDP will likely shrink by a full 5 percent this year, cutting off food, shelter, and medical care for millions of Afghans. In 2022, after a magnitude 6.1 quake hit southeastern Afghanistan the US gave $55 million for food, health, and sanitation supplies. The next year, it gave $12 million in the wake of yet another earthquake. But this time, the US offered nothing.

Globally, we are at risk of unraveling decades of progress in making disasters less deadly, driven by investments in infrastructure, early warning systems, and better coordination between the patchwork of actors and agencies that kicks into gear when crisis strikes. Foreign aid has always been a critical part of that puzzle in low-income countries like Afghanistan. A steady flow of foreign aid helps facilitate the kind of development — the roads and resources — needed to make emergency response truly effective when disaster strikes.

The US isn’t alone in slashing aid. As a result of the worldwide retreat in funding lifesaving development programs, every disaster is now deadlier than it needs to be — and every aid worker is left navigating an increasingly dysfunctional system.

“The resources are really, really scarce right now,” said Khan. If the money was there like it used to be, he told Vox that he “would be on the ground working side-by-side with my team right now. We are really feeling the difference.”

How disaster relief works

When an earthquake or a cyclone strikes a poor village, what normally happens first is that the country’s government puts out a call for international relief.

Then, a hodgepodge of NGOs, United Nations agencies, and foreign governments would spring into action. USAID would typically pledge a few million dollars to the government of the affected country or — as would be the case for an unfriendly ruler like the Taliban — to a United Nations agency or humanitarian organizations like the Red Cross working on the ground.

Sometimes, the US would even lend out one of its highly specialized search and rescue task forces to respond to a disaster overseas, as it did to Haiti, Turkey, Peru, the Bahamas, Nepal, and Japan after earthquakes, flooding, and hurricanes over the past decade.

The coordination would kick in really quickly. Most humanitarian organizations didn’t even wait for the contracts to be signed before flying their teams straight into the epicenter to work with local agencies and nonprofits on the ground.

After decades of collaboration, most humanitarian organizations trusted that “the US government would pay its bills” or reimburse them eventually for the costs incurred, said Jeremy Konyndyk, who ran USAID’s disaster assistance branch under the Obama administration and now leads the advocacy group Refugees International. By having those relationships at the ready, a response can kick in much faster when disaster strikes.  “Sometimes you need the relief to move faster than our grant processes.”

That trust didn’t come overnight, nor did USAID’s capacity for responding quickly to global disasters, he said. Over time, “it evolved and it grew and iterated,” he said. “It became this really amazing professional operational, deployable machine.”

What makes the most difference in the immediate aftermath of a disaster is not an injection of emergency donations. It’s not as simple as crowdfunding a search and rescue team. Instead, long-term infrastructure projects — often fueled by foreign aid — are what really wax the wheels of disaster relief, ensuring that help can come as fast and efficiently as possible.

It’s important that the protocols are already in place and the rescuers are already on call to respond effectively by the time disaster strikes. But, it’s equally important that the clinics are open, the roads are paved, the water is clean, and the houses are strong enough to withstand some damage.

Achieving those goals through global cooperation has been extremely important for low-income countries, where disasters are still far more deadly than in rich countries, despite efforts to improve early warning systems worldwide.

But, they have made progress, which helps explain why earthquakes, cyclones, and floods used to kill far more people a century ago than they do today, despite there being way more people now, more data reporting, and more disasters tied to climate change than before.

The new math of who gets saved

But now, with the death of USAID and plenty of other countries taking sledgehammers to their own aid agencies, everything about disaster relief has gotten a lot more sluggish.

The Taliban, which seized power in Afghanistan in 2021, put out an appeal for aid shortly after the earthquake struck at the end of August. So did the leader of a local rebel group in Sudan last week, after a devastating landslide killed over 1,000 people in a region already ravaged by war and famine.

While a few countries have stepped in to help in the aftermath of the earthquake — including the European Union, China, India, and the United Kingdom — aid workers like Khan say the absence of the US is directly impacting their response. “It’s just a complete mess,” said Konyndyk. “As a functional matter, the US government is simply out of the business of disaster aid globally,” and “it’s done huge damage.”

Those search and rescue task forces the US used to send? They’re still technically on retainer, but in what Konyndyk called an “entirely insane” twist, the Trump administration cancelled the emergency transport contracts that used to get them where they needed to go — meaning that it’s now basically impossible to get them overseas, especially on a time crunch.

It took four days to get those task forces to Texas after the floods this summer — the same first responders that made it to Syria and Turkey after the 2023 earthquake in justtwodays.

The USAID subagency that once handled global disaster logistics has been quietly subsumed into the much smaller office within the Office of Refugee Resettlement as part of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Not that it seems to be doing much anyway. After a magnitude 7.7 earthquake killed 3,800 people in Myanmar back in March, the US was mostly absent in the disaster response. The UN’s human rights expert for Myanmar recently told the Associated Press that a mixture of aid cuts and the notable absence of US logistical support has severely hampered the country’s ability to recover.

A number of monks stand in front of a collapsed building surrounded by rubble from other collapsed buildings around them.

Previous earthquakes had led to the deployment of a full US-led rescue team with dozens of rescuers, search dogs, and heavy machinery that could pull people out alive. This time, the US flew in a team of just three aid workers to assess the damage and then promptly fired them all via email mere days after their arrival as they slept in the rubble-strewn streets of the earthquake zone.

The situation in Afghanistan is even worse. After the Taliban’s takeover, the US remained the country’s largest source of aid by far, sending billions to the poverty-stricken country over the past four years.

The Trump administration’s decision to slash the vast majority of aid spending cut the country off from urgent food aid, forced the closure of about 400 humanitarian health clinics40 percent of the country’s total — and gave girls even fewer options to go to school.

“You just name any crisis — we are seeing it over here,” said Khan, who’s especially worried about how damage to water and housing infrastructure could increase the prevalence of disease and make it impossible for families to weather the coming winter. It would be one thing if this were the only crisis on his plate, but the earthquake is only the latest in a series of crises, including a severe drought that has left about one-third of the population facing acute food insecurity and the millions of Afghans forced out of neighboring nations.

“These are very resilient people,” he said. “They just need backing.”

A recipe for disaster…or relief

Saving more lives is about more than money for any individual disaster; it’s about addressing a brewing logistical nightmare that’s making the world less safe and far less prepared to respond to all different kinds of crises.

Take Sudan. Western media didn’t even report on the deadly landslide that occurred there — which destroyed an entire village — until two days after the disaster hit. And, the ongoing civil war makes it extremely difficult to get humanitarian aid inside the country anyway, particularly in the region most affected, where many have sought refuge from the violence precisely because the area is so remote.

But almost unthinkably, the destruction of USAID — which funded the bulk of humanitarian relief that did make it into the country — has made things even worse. It ruptured longstanding relationships, unceremoniously firing some of the only people with the logistical expertise needed to navigate such tricky terrain. No matter what comes next, it won’t be easy to build back.

“We are facing a huge loss of capacity and trust,” said Patricia McIlreavy, head of the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, who has spent decades working in humanitarian aid, including in Sudan.

“There may be others who fill those gaps. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just a real unknown,” she said. “How will it look? How will people get support? Will they get support?”

In the meantime, she fears that all of the “cuts in funding, but also cuts in capacity, and cuts in expertise and relationship-building” could have dire consequences long after the dust settles.

“People on the ground in Sudan, people on the ground in Afghanistan, don’t have a vote on any of these changes,” she said. “All they know is nothing is coming.”

At the end of the day, natural disasters don’t see borders. There’s something very human — apolitical, even — in the impulse to support one another in the wake of such tragedies.

Afghanistan offered $100,000 to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Mexico sent dozens of firefighters to Los Angeles when wildfires broke out earlier this year. Hundreds of Canadian workers descended on North Carolina to help restore power after Hurricane Helene.

And with climate change accelerating the pace and intensity of natural disasters around the world — but especially in places like Afghanistan and Sudan — like it or not, we are all in this together.

Granted, the US used to anchor a vast global emergency response infrastructure, and individual donations are absolutely no replacement for that.

But in Sudan — where local volunteer networks have managed to bring lifesaving relief to places that many western donors gave up on years ago — anything is still better than nothing, especially if you choose to support for the long haul. The same is true in Afghanistan, where aid workers have trudged for hours in search of survivors to pull from the rubble.

“We all have a belief that help will come, and when we erode that hope, I think we do something to who we are as people,” said McIlreavy. “How are we advancing together if we can’t believe that we are somehow there for each other?”

 

Four masked men in police tactical vests surround a young scooter rider, cuffing his hands behind his back. One person, whose face is fully obscured with a cap, sunglasses and a balaclava, is heard on eyewitness video telling the scooter rider: “You came into this country as a J1, as an exchange student. You didn’t show up … You lied, ok?”

“Yeah, he’s illegal, either way,” another person is heard saying, before they lead him to an unmarked car.

Screengrab from a video showing a man being arrested by federal agents along Florida Avenue Northwest, Washington DC on Tuesday, Sept. 2. Source: Instagram/@will.allendupraw

Nearby, two Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) cars are seen blocking part of the lane. Uniformed MPD officers stand around the area, neither intervening nor appearing to participate directly in the arrest.

MPD vehicles seen blocking part of a lane where federal officers are arresting a man on a scooter along Florida Avenue Northwest, Washington DC on Tuesday, Sept. 2. Source: Instagram/@will.allendupraw

The video was posted by Will Allen-DuPraw, whose profile says that he is a photographer and videographer based in DC, on Sept. 2. Allen-DuPraw wrote in the post that bystanders reported that authorities were stopping Latino men on scooters along Florida Avenue Northwest, a major road in Washington DC, and had arrested two.

An urgent alert sent out on the morning of the same day by Stop ICE Alerts, a community-driven alert network for those affected by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, reported similar information. The alert said that ICE, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) – a branch of ICE focused on investigating transnational crime – and MPD were “stopping Latinos on scooters” and had arrested one or two people along Florida Avenue Northwest.

A Metropolitan Police officer directs traffic at a checkpoint on New York Avenue after US President Donald Trump deployed US National Guard troops to Washington and ordered an increase in the presence of federal law enforcement to assist in crime prevention, in Washington, DC. Source: Reuters/Al Drago

With US President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration, scenes of federal agents detaining people while accusing them of immigration offences have been cropping up all over social media from around the country. An analysis of ICE arrest data by DC-based think tank Cato Institute found that in June and July alone, ICE conducted almost 9,000 street arrests nationwide of immigrants who had no criminal convictions, charges, or removal orders. About 90 percent of these were immigrants from Latin America.

The incident on Florida Avenue Northwest was one of 42 that Bellingcat and our partner Evident Media geolocated and verified using videos and photos from social media and news reports. These showed federal agent encounters in the capital, in the month or so since Trump’s federal takeover of DC on August 11. The full dataset can be downloaded here.

In the three weeks after DC was placed under federal control, Trump’s administration said more than 300 people without legal immigration status were arrested in the District.

Like previous immigration raids that we documented in Los Angeles, the federal agents involved in the DC cases were often masked and in military wear. Some wore generic “Police” vests, while others had attire indicating specific government entities such as ICE and HSI. The vehicles they used were usually unmarked, with plates from a variety of US states.

Car plates from a variety of US states that federal agents in DC were filmed using in Washington DC. Source: Evident Media

There is one key difference, however. In LA, a state law prohibits local law enforcement from using its resources for immigration enforcement in most cases. But in DC, where no such law applies, MPD has frequently been seen working with federal officers since the federal takeover last month.

In half of the incidents in our dataset, local DC law enforcement could be seen working alongside federal agents. Most of the DC local police were from MPD, though some were from the Metro Transit Police Department. Aside from ICE and HSI, agents from federal agencies including the US Park Police, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) were also seen in the videos.

Agents from US Park Police, FBI, DEA and ATF were seen in the videos. Source: Evident Media

“We are definitely seeing MPD cooperate at a level we’ve never seen before, and it is resulting in people getting arrested and sent to detention,” Michael Lukens, who runs immigrant rights centre Amica, told Evident Media.

MPD has not replied to Evident Media’s queries about their cooperation with federal law enforcement agencies as of publication.

Of the cases we analysed, 22 involved the arrest of delivery drivers or tradespeople, such as workers in an air conditioning and heating truck.

In two widely shared videos, DC resident Tyler DeSue claimed agents pulled over his Uber Eats driver for having “incorrect tags” on his bike, then checked his registration and insurance and saw it was valid. DeSue said they then asked for his immigration status and detained him.

Police officers, one in an HSI vest, seen questioning a man in a video posted by Tyler DeSue on Aug. 17. Source: TikTok/@td13__

The videos DeSue posted did not show the initial encounter between the agents and the driver, but did show the arrest. DeSue can be heard in one video telling agents that the man they were questioning did not understand what they were saying, and they should use Google Translate. Another witness is heard calling the arrest “ridiculous” and questioning if the agents have “better things to do than to harass Uber Eats drivers”.

In a second video, also posted by DeSue, agents are seen wrapping the man in chains before putting him in an unmarked car.

A second video posted by DeSue on Aug. 17 show agents wrapping the man in chains before putting him into an unmarked car. Source: TikTok/@td13__

Another video posted by NPR reporter Chiara Eisner on Aug. 21 shows an agent in a “Police” tactical vest handcuffing a man in front of a truck, with US Park Police nearby. When Eisner asks what is happening, a Park Police officer says this is a traffic enforcement because the man was driving a commercial vehicle on park roads.

US Park Police stand by as a man is arrested by an agent in a “Police” tactical vest, after what they said was a traffic enforcement for driving a commercial vehicle on park roads. Source: TikTok/@chiaraeisner

Evident Media asked the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) about videos of these two specific incidents, as well as whether federal agents were using race or language as factors in their stops and arrests. In response, a DHS spokesperson said:

“What makes someone a target for immigration enforcement is if they are illegally in the US – NOT their skin colour, race or ethnicity. America’s brave men and women are removing murderers, MS-13 gang members, pedophiles, rapists – truly the worst of the worst from our communities.”

The spokesperson also claimed that the men detained in these two incidents were undocumented immigrants who entered the country illegally. They did not mention any other criminal record for the men or comment on why the men were stopped by local police in the first place.

Lukens told Evident Media that ICE agents had been seen in areas with larger immigrant populations, such as Columbia Heights and Adams Morgan, which he described as “high-level racial profiling”.

Constitutionally, the Fourth Amendment protects anyone in the US, regardless of immigration status, from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government.

“If you are an ICE officer and the only thing that you have to fall on or to fall back on in justifying arrest is a person’s racial makeup and what vehicle they are driving, then you have conducted an illegal stop and an illegal arrest,” Lukens said.

Melissa Zhu, Eoghan Macguire, Pooja Chaudhuri, Kolina Koltai, Vladimir Zaha, Fraser Crichton and Bonny Albo contributed research to this piece.

From Evident Media, Jennifer Smart, Kevin Clancy and Zach Toombs contributed to research and production for the video report.

Bellingcat is a non-profit and the ability to carry out our work is dependent on the kind support of individual donors. If you would like to support our work, you can do so here. You can also subscribe to our Patreon channel here. Subscribe to our Newsletter and follow us on Bluesky here and Mastodon here.

 

Philadelphia’s transit system plunged into crisis on August 24, when the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) slashed bus, trolley, subway, and Regional Rail service by 20%. SEPTA eliminated 32 bus routes, shortened 16 more, and reduced the frequency of other bus and train lines. The crisis occurred as a result of state lawmakers failing to close a USD 213 million budget gap. The funding standoff left the city’s 746,500 SEPTA riders stranded and pushed the nation’s sixth-largest transit agency toward what officials call a “death spiral” – which has deeply impacted the disproportionately Black and lower-income SEPTA ridership. Nearly three-quarters of Philadelphia transit riders don’t own a car; more than half are Black, and nearly half earn under USD 30,000 a year.

Cuts to public transit in Philadelphia have forced commuters to double their commute time, says longtime Philly-based organizer Talia Giles. In the process of interviewing Philly residents following SEPTA cuts, Giles said, “one of the people that we spoke to was a student, and she said that she’s lucky now if she makes it home within 45 minutes. But originally her commute was 20.”

But amid this crisis, as students and workers struggled to get to their destinations, a sports betting company stepped in to fill in the gaps to make sure that people could get to the first football game of the season on September 4. FanDuel, an online gambling company, pledged USD 80,000 to keep trains running on the Broad Street Line for the Philadelphia Eagles’ home opener. 

Transit across the country faces similar crisis

What led to this mass transit crisis? A huge boost in funds from the federal government to SEPTA during the pandemic has since been exhausted.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, aid was distributed by the US government to transit systems of major cities. Federal COVID relief funds provided to SEPTA amounted to about USD 1.5 billion, but this money was exhausted by June 2024. SEPTA never recovered its pre-pandemic ridership, and this, combined with the end of federal relief funds, contributed to the budget crisis that has raised new questions about the federal government’s role in supporting transit systems in major cities.

In Philadelphia, the lack of federal aid for SEPTA was exacerbated by the fact that unlike New York or Los Angeles, Philadelphia lacks a dedicated regional tax to fund transit.

Other transit systems which could face similar budget challenges with the end of federal COVID relief include the public transit in Chicago, Dallas, Portland, and San Francisco. For example, Chicago transit faces a USD 771 million budget deficit.

Service returns, but at a cost

On September 4, days after the service reductions went into place across Philadelphia, a Pennsylvania court ordered SEPTA to halt all planned service cuts, including eliminations of bus routes, Regional Rail lines, station closures, and curfews, and to immediately restore any services that had been reduced or eliminated. On Monday, September 8, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro approved SEPTA’s request to redirect up to USD 394 million in capital assistance funds initially earmarked for infrastructure, to maintain and restore daily operations. This funding shift is expected to stave off further cuts for approximately two years.

Despite the restored service, SEPTA plans to implement a 21.5% fare hike, from USD 2.50 to 2.90, effective September 14. Despite the cuts to service, Giles claims that “we’ve also seen increased police presence and then increased fines and arrests” for fare evasion.

Philadelphia is labeled as the “poorest big city” in the US, with the highest poverty rate of any of the nation’s 10 largest cities. The SEPTA cuts hit lower income riders the hardest, a disproportionate number of whom are Black in a city with a plurality of Black residents, making up almost 40% of the city’s population. In 2023, the Transit app conducted a survey which revealed that in Philadelphia, nearly three-quarters of transit riders lack access to a car. Over half are Black, and almost half live in households making under USD 30,000 a year.

“The SEPTA crisis is a clear example of how poor and working people are so often denied basic public services,” said Walter Smolarek, a longtime Philadelphia resident and editor of Liberation News. “Even though major corporations like Comcast and Vanguard Financial are headquartered in the Philadelphia area, the city still lacks the tax revenue to meet its residents’ needs. Philadelphia is also home to about half of Pennsylvania’s Black population, and right-wing politicians from majority white areas routinely refuse to provide the city its fair share of state funding.”

In response to SEPTA’s restoration of transit services, some riders are reacting with indignation to the upcoming fare hikes. “It’s a racket, it’s a money grab. They already knew they had the money, they had the funding. They just want people to possibly suffer who can’t afford it as is at 2.50 dollars. It wasn’t that long ago we went up to 2.50 dollars and now 2.90 dollars, it’s impossible,” said Goldie Chavous, a SEPTA rider, told FOX 29.

The post Philadelphia public transit “death spiral” is a warning for other underfunded cities across the US appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.


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Israeli airstrikes target the the Al-Rouya residential tower in Gaza City on September 7, 2025. (Screen shot of video by Abdel Qader Sabbah.)

GAZA CITY—The Israeli military is waging an all-out, aerial assault concentrated on Gaza City, targeting dozens of high-rise towers in the heart of the city and reducing them to rubble. The destruction of residential buildings and tent encampments nearby is part of its stated operation to ethnically cleanse the entire area of the nearly one million Palestinians sheltering there and force them south.

“I promised you a few days ago that we would destroy Gaza’s terror towers. This is exactly what we are doing,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a video statement from the Defense Ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv on Monday. “In the past two days, 50 of these towers have fallen. The air force brought them down. Now all of this is just an introduction, just a prelude, to the main intense operation—a ground maneuver of our forces, who are now organizing and gathering in Gaza City,” he said, adding, “And so I say to the residents of Gaza, I am taking advantage of this opportunity, and listen to me carefully: You have been warned. Get out of there!”

On Sunday, Israeli airstrikes destroyed the Al-Rouya residential tower in Tel al-Hawa, a neighborhood in southwest Gaza City. The massive blast toppled the high-rise building, sending massive plumes of smoke and ash into the air. Residents say they were barely given any warning to flee the area before the strike.

Israeli airstrikes destroy the Al-Rouya building in Gaza City on September 7, 2025. Video by Abdel Qader Sabbah.

“They threatened to target the tower about an hour ago, and then told us to evacuate. We didn’t have time to take anything,” Hayam Saad, who was living with her husband, children and other relatives in a tent encampment next to the Al-Rouya building, said as she she stood in the rubble alongside destroyed tents and shredded belongings. “I left my things as they were and ran away, with small children in tow.” Saad and her family were displaced from the eastern Gaza City neighborhood of Shujaiyya three months ago after an Israeli airstrike on their apartment that killed Saad’s daughter-in-law. “There was blood everywhere in the apartment. We couldn’t find a leg, a head, or anything. We then left the area,” she said.

“There’s nothing, as you can see. Where are we supposed to go now? Who’s going to give us tents? Who’s going to house us? We don’t know where to go,” she said. Her husband, Ahed Al-Abed Saad, said they lost their meager belongings in the attack. “We’ve come here and found nothing. No clothes, no food, no water, not even tents,” he told Drop Site. “All of this is to force people to scatter to the south. Right now, we have nothing, we’re going to sleep on the rubble.”

Ahed Al-Abed Saad standing near his tent by the rubble of the Al-Rouya building in Gaza City. September 7, 2025. (Screenshot of video by Abdel Qader Sabbah.)

Hundreds of other displaced families were sifting through the debris to try and salvage what little they could. “They didn’t give us enough time to remove the necessary items from the tents for the displaced or from inside the tower itself for some of the displaced people,” Mahmoud Naim, a 33-year-old from Beit Hanoun, told Drop Site as he stood amid the rubble of the Al-Rouya building on Sunday. “The tower was bombed in less than an hour, and the area was completely destroyed. The tents of the displaced were also destroyed. These tents housed hundreds of displaced people from various areas—from the north, from central Gaza, from Gaza City, from Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahiya, Jabalia refugee camp, Shujaiyya, Al-Tuffah, Al-Sabra, and all areas of Gaza.”

Israeli leaders have openly bragged about destroying Gaza City as part of a campaign to force out all of the Palestinians living there, as they have in other cities like Beit Hanoun, Rafah, and elsewhere.

The Israeli military first announced the intentional targeting of multiple high rises as part of its assault on Gaza City on Friday, claiming without offering any evidence that they were being used by Hamas fighters. The Israeli military only circulated a video showing the Mushtaha Tower, a 16-story building in a densely crowded western area of the city, with a graphic rendering of a supposed camera on the top of the building as “proof.” In the following days, they destroyed at least 50 buildings.

On Monday, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz posted on X: “A mighty hurricane will hit the skies of Gaza City today, and the roofs of the terror towers will shake. This is a final warning to the murderers and rapists of Hamas in Gaza and in the luxury hotels abroad: Release the hostages and lay down your weapons - or Gaza will be destroyed, and you will be annihilated.”

The Israeli targeting of the Mushtaha Tower on Friday also destroyed a mass tent encampment next to the building, where hundreds of displaced Palestinians had fled from neighborhoods in the northern and eastern parts of the city as the Israeli military invaded.

Um Samir al-Ajlouni, who was displaced from the Zaytoun neighborhood, was sitting in front of her tent near the Mushtaha Tower on Friday when everyone around began shouting that the Israelis were about to bomb the building. Less than half an hour later, the massive structure was reduced to rubble. “When I returned to my tent, I found nothing. The tent was leveled to the ground, and our family’s belongings were scattered and lost. Even the bread I was preparing for my children, I couldn’t find,” al-Ajlouni told Drop Site. She said she thought of trying to go south in a desperate attempt to seek shelter but she couldn’t afford it. “I don’t have any money to pay for transport, and my tent was completely destroyed, so I no longer have any shelter,” she said. “We will have to walk on foot for a long distance… we have no other option. The tent we used to live in cost 200 shekels ($60), and today its price has risen to 4,000 shekels ($1,200), an amount most families cannot afford.”

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A girl sits among the wreckage of her family’s tent after Israeli airstrikes destroyed the nearby al-Rouya building in Gaza City. September 7, 2025. (Screenshot of video by Abdel Qader Sabbah.)

Civil Defense spokesman Mahmoud Bassal confirmed the offensive on Gaza City that began last month is the most violent attack on the city since Israel broke the ceasefire on March 18 and resumed its genocidal scorched earth campaign.

“Over the past two days alone, at least 50 residential buildings have been completely destroyed and 100 others were partially damaged that were housing thousands of displaced people,” Bassal told Drop Site. “The strikes also targeted mosques and playgrounds and led to the destruction of more than 200 tents belonging to displaced people living near the targeted buildings.” Bassal added that Civil Defense teams are trying to respond to multiple distress calls reporting people trapped under the rubble. “In not all cases do residents have a chance to escape. Most of the strikes that targeted buildings were carried out without evacuation warnings, causing the martyrdom of the residents.”

Among dozens of Palestinians killed on Monday was Osama Balousha, a photojournalist who was killed in an Israeli airstrike that targeted his home in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhoods of Gaza City, bringing the number of journalists killed to nearly 250, according to Gaza’s government media office.

In addition to housing hundreds of families, many of Gaza’s high-rise buildings were home to businesses and recreational centers. “This tower is not just a building, as you can see, it’s not just floors stacked on top of each other. These are memories. The tower is the days we have lived. I used to train and spend my days at the gym here,” Maher Haboush, a fitness coach who used to train at Oxygen Club, a well-known gym inside the Al-Rouya building, told Drop Site as he stood amid the rubble on Sunday. “There are no friends left, no money left, and nothing to remember. Even the memories, they are taking them away from us.”

Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Jawa Ahmad contributed to this report.

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