Latest news with #Hersh
Montreal Gazette
27-05-2025
- Montreal Gazette
‘Flood the world with goodness,' parents of hostage killed by Hamas say at Montreal event
News By The parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a 23-year-old Israeli-American who Hamas took hostage and later killed, urged Canadians to push back against misinformation and 'flood the world with goodness' during a public appearance in Montreal. Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin spoke at the Montreal Holocaust Museum Monday at an event moderated by community member Lisa Singer and organized by Federation CJA. The couple shared their son's story with the hundreds of people who turned out, highlighting the 58 hostages still believed to be held in Gaza. During the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 2023, which killed around 1,200 people — mostly civilians — their son Hersh was taken from a bomb shelter. Part of his arm was severed from a rocket blast. Held in Gaza for nearly 11 months, Hersh was confirmed dead in August 2024. When his body was recovered, it showed signs of close-range gunshot wounds to the hand, neck, shoulder and head. He was one of six hostages Hamas executed shortly before their remains were found. On Monday, the couple spoke about their lives before and after the Oct. 7 attack, who their son was, and what gives them the strength to carry on. They described Hersh as a friend to everyone and full of life. Born in Berkeley, Calif., and raised in Richmond, Va., Hersh moved to Israel with his family in 2008. He had recently returned from travelling in Europe and was planning to explore more of the world when he attended the Re'im Music Festival near the Gaza border. 'He was a normal person. Not perfect, but the perfect son for me,' Goldberg-Polin said. 'I feel like God was very wise, saying, 'Rachel's going to have one son — this is the one she's getting.'' Goldberg-Polin stressed the need to not shy away from what happened to Hersh and others. Even the forensic details, she said, such as gunpowder embedded in his hair from being shot at close range, should not be hidden. 'It's the truth, and it's testimony, and I think that's critical. … In a world where so much can be manipulated, where there's AI and disinformation, truthful testimony matters.' They described a meeting with another released hostage who had seen Hersh weeks into captivity. Despite his injuries, they said he stayed mentally strong and often repeated the phrase: 'He who has a 'why' can bear almost any 'how.'' The couple has been travelling the globe to share Hersh's story and rally international support for the remaining hostages. Asked when she misses him most, Goldberg-Polin replied: 'When I'm breathing.' 'I had a son, and I loved him, and he knew it, and he loved me, and I knew it. I was blessed — and I am blessed.'
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Community Corner: Tickets still available for TedxSavannah 2025!
This Friday, May 16, you're invited to be a part of important conversations that have the power to affect positive change in our returns featuring a dozen local thought Hersh and Karla Jennings are both TEDxSavannah board is also a former TEDxSavannah speaker and a current speaker sat down with WSAV's Kim Gusby on today's Community Corner to talk about the 14th annual event. Click the arrow in the video box above to watch the interview. TEDxSavannah 2025Friday, May 169 a.m. to 2 Arts Auditorium, Georgia Southern University's Armstrong Campus, 11935Doors open at 8 a.m. Get tickets here. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hindu
01-05-2025
- Politics
- The Hindu
Eye-openers: from Vietnam to Gaza, ways to hold power to account
On April 30, Vietnam celebrated 50 years of the reunification of the North and South after the decades-long Vietnam War ended with the government of Saigon surrendering to the North Vietnamese forces in 1975. The American entanglement in the South East Asian country began in November 1955, with the U.S. fearing a communist takeover of the South by North Vietnam. After U.S. Army troops landed in South Vietnam in 1965, it dragged on for 10 more years. By the mid and late 1960s, however, there was growing disenchantment with the war effort and the rising numbers of the dead. Stories were emanating about atrocities committed by the U.S. troops in Vietnam and anti-war protests began to grow across campuses and in cities including in the capital Washington D.C. In 1969, journalist Seymour Hersh's attention was drawn to a small news item that a certain Lieutenant William Calley had been charged with the 'murder of 102 'Oriental human beings'' in the hamlet of My Lai in Vietnam. Journalists get to work Hersh tracked Calley and other members of the 'Charlie Company' who had led the assault on March 16, 1968, and reconstructed the story of the atrocity. His book, My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and its Aftermath, is a chilling read about over-reach, and how the killing began without warning, with even women and babies not being spared. The purpose of American troops to be at My Lai that day — to stop the Vietcong troops in their tracks — wasn't served either. Hersh, like Daniel Ellsberg later with The Pentagon Papers leak, was going against the grain of what most journalists were covering on the Vietnam war. Most of them supported the 'noble cause'. The Pentagon Papers: The Secret History of the Vietnam War, by Neil Sheehan and others, first appeared as a series of articles in The New York Times in 1971, on the study, revealing in detail, 'and in the government's own words', how several U.S. administrations had blundered through a disastrous war. The study had been commissioned in 1967 by then Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, who had created a unit in the Pentagon to 'collect as many internal documents as possible on the Vietnam War.' There were 47 volumes in all, covering all aspects of the U.S. involvement in Indochina for decades. Sheehan, a celebrated Vietnam reporter, had got wind of the study and pursued Ellsberg, a senior member of the government-funded Rand Corporation who was privy to it, to share them with him. The war finally ended in 1975, with the Pentagon Papers playing a crucial role in its closure. Bearing witness In the face of fierce opposition in the late 1960s, philosopher and writer Bertrand Russell, then in his nineties, brought together prominent cultural and political personalities to 'bear witness to unrestrained American military action' in Vietnam. In his book, Vietdamned, Clive Webb brings to light the peace activism of Russell and other luminaries of the literary world including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Peter Weiss to end the war. They were derided for their activism but Webb sees the tribunal as a cautionary tale and writes about it as a reminder of the 'ruthlessness with which politicians and the press attempted to discredit their evidence, and the lessons to be learned about our continued need to hold to account those in power.' That's what journalist Omar El Akkad does in his recent book, One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This. He wonders aloud why the U.S. and the West have been largely immune to the unimaginable suffering of civilians in Gaza unleashed by Israel since the October 7 Hamas attack. In chapters with titles including Departure, Witness, Fear, Resistance, Language, Arrival, Akkad tries to make sense of the happenings in Gaza; why, for instance, was an 18-month-old found with a bullet wound to the forehead. The Egyptian-Canadian journalist and writer watched the Gulf War on CNN — 'Baghdad cityscapes detonating sporadically in balls of pale white light' — and was soon surprised that there was no reaction at all. 'It was just what happened to certain places, to certain people: they became balls of pale white light. What mattered was, it wasn't us.' As a journalist, Akkad has travelled to several countries in West Asia and also to Afghanistan, and his view on political malice is fierce: 'Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.' The Gaza tragedy Things came crashing down after October 2023, he writes, when Israel with the support of a vast majority of the Western world's political power centres enacted a 'campaign of active genocide' against the Palestinian people, documented for posterity. More than 50,000 people have died, thousands injured and millions displaced. Death by disease and famine stalks a population wilfully denied aid and medical help. 'Over and over, residents were ordered from their neighbourhoods into 'safe zones', and then wiped out.' Akkad is scathing when he writes that 'once far enough removed, everyone will be properly aghast that any of this was allowed to happen. But for now, it's so much safer to look away.' The antidote, of course, is to 'slip the leash' as Wilfred Burchett put it when he fled from the embedded journalists with Allied forces in Japan in 1945 and set out for Hiroshima. He then went on to record the annihilation he witnessed after the atomic bombing and despatched his piece with the words: 'I write this as a warning to the world' (Tell Me No Lies/Ed. John Pilger).
Yahoo
27-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump's Trade War on Canada Could Devastate Northern Border States
In justifying his tariffs on Canada and Mexico, President Donald Trump has argued that our two closest neighbors would bear the brunt of costs—despite the protestations of economists, who say the price hikes are more often felt by consumers, not the targeted countries. But beyond the likely de facto surcharges levied on every American, the impacts will be felt especially by those border states whose economies are intertwined with the countries to our north and south. For northern border states, the intensifying trade war with Canada could have staggering long-term economic effects. In levying tariffs on Mexico and Canada—the two largest trading partners of the United States and co-members of a trade agreement that the first Trump administration negotiated and joined—the president has cited a desire to stem the cross-border flow of fentanyl and undocumented immigrants. Although some of the announced tariffs were subject to a temporary reprieve, this pause is set to expire in April. Canada has instituted reciprocal tariffs, with newly minted Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney previously likening his country's response to standing up to a bully. The northern border stretches from coast to coast, meaning that different parts of the U.S. rely on Canada for different purposes. In Washington state, for example, the economies are primarily connected through tourism. In Midwestern states, the supply chains relating to the automotive industry are integrated with Canada—and thus have particularly been affected by tariffs on steel, aluminum, as well as the additional tariffs on auto imports announced this week. In the Northeast, in particular, trade of food products may be disturbed by tariffs. The northern border states will also be affected by oil and gas tariffs, as the majority of American crude oil and electricity imports all come from Canada. In the Mountain West border state of Montana, for example, 92 percent of imports are sourced from Canada, and the majority of that is composed of oil imports. 'Montana, North Dakota, [and] Maine all have really disproportionately high shares of their trade with Canada, and the lion's share of that is oil and gas,' said Adam Hersh, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. According to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of U.S. census data, 69 percent of Maine imports and 64 percent of North Dakota imports are sourced from Canada. Hersh also noted that the oil refining industry would be greatly affected if the pause on tariffs on Canadian oil and gas—set to expire in the beginning of April—is not extended. 'The cost of the refining industry in the U.S. is configured around the kind of oil that we get from Canada, and so refineries can't really just turn on a dime and start refining oil from other places in the world that have different chemical properties. So if the tariffs devolve to hit these oil products, then this could be pretty disruptive,' said Hersh. The premier of Alberta has warned that the Canadian province will look to diversify its oil exports away from the U.S. if these penalties are instated. Then there is the daily interaction between citizens of the two countries, given the relative ease of traversing the northern border: Canadians may travel to the U.S. simply to shop or go to restaurants. Jennifer Bettis, research and program manager at the Border Policy Research Institute at Western Washington University, noted that her region is particularly reliant on these relationships—not only are 40 percent of jobs in Washington state tied to trade, the indirect effects on cross-border travel are already harming tourism-heavy economies right on the border, such as the exclave of Point Roberts, which is not attached to the contiguous United States. 'Border states tend to feel policies at the federal level a bit more acutely, because we're often on the margins of policymaking, and there's a lot of unintended consequences with policy that are felt differently in border states,' said Bettis, who was the project lead on a storymap illustrating the trade relationships between different sectors of the northern border states and Canada. For example, automakers in Michigan may be particularly affected by the newly announced 25 percent tariff on auto imports, as many auto parts cross the border multiple times before and during the building of a car. Trump's announcement was cheered by the United Auto Workers, with union president Shaun Fain saying that it is now incumbent upon automakers to 'to bring back good union jobs to the U.S.' But Glenn Stevens, executive director of MichAuto and vice president at the Detroit Regional Chamber, told Bridge Michigan that increasing production in the U.S. is 'by no means a quick process' and that 'these are complex decisions that will take time, long past when the tariffs' impact will be felt within the industry.' While automakers in Michigan may be seeing the consequences of the tariffs in the immediate term, other industries may still be waiting for the other shoe to drop. For Seth Kroeck, a farmer at Crystal Spring Farm in Brunswick, Maine, the effects of the tariffs are yet to be seen, but the uncertainty surrounding them is anathema to producers who already must contend with the unpredictability of a growing season. Crystal Spring Farm grows wild organic blueberries, among other produce. Maine is the largest producer of wild blueberries in the world, but several provinces in eastern Canada are also major producers. Because they are grown close to the ground, wild blueberries require significant processing. Even though there has traditionally been 'friendly competition' between wild blueberry producers in Maine and Canada, Kroeck said, the industry is integrated between the two countries. 'There are several processors that operate on both sides of the borders, or will take berries, say, from Canada—[which] has maybe a slightly later season than we do—to keep the processing plants in Maine running longer, which allows them to employ people for longer periods of time,' explained Kroeck. Kroeck's farm sells its berries in New England, meaning that he is in direct competition with Canadian growers who may sell their wild blueberries at a cheaper price point. If Canadian blueberries are suddenly more expensive, that could benefit more local producers like Crystal Spring Farm. But it wouldn't necessarily be a net win for producers like Kroeck. 'If the Canadian blueberries were no longer brought over to the U.S. to be processed, then processors would make less profit, which means maybe they would be charging [more] of all of us who get our blueberries processed through them,' said Kroeck. 'Nobody knows really what's going to happen and how it's all going to shake out. But we can see potential benefits, as in cutting off the Canadian flow of products, and maybe some potential downsides by having less product going back and forth across that helps float the industry as a whole.' Wild blueberries are not the only industry in Maine that may be affected by the trade war with Canada. Sarah Alexander, the executive director of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, said that dairy and livestock producers in the state were particularly affected by the tariffs, as grain and feed are major imports from Canada. 'Immediately, when the tariffs went into place, several grain suppliers sent out letters right away saying that the impact of the tariffs was going to have to be passed along to the farmers that were purchasing that grain,' Alexander said. She added that tariffs on steel and aluminum were also affecting producers, with increased price quotes on greenhouses and other farming infrastructure. Moreover, local farmers have been affected by freezes on Agriculture Department funds, and in many cases are still waiting to receive the grants contracted to them by the federal government. 'There's so much uncertainty in farming to start out with that producers are always just sort of making their best-laid plan and then seeing how things go,' Alexander said. 'The tariffs are kind of in the mix of a lot of other uncertainty that is also happening at the same time, and that's definitely adding more stress in what is already a pretty stressful part of the season where you're just trying to get things going.' While the impacts of a trade war with Canada may be felt more immediately across the forty-ninth parallel, they will also spread further south. Well beyond the border, many states count Canada as a major trading partner. Canadian oil is a major import for Oklahoma, for example, where many crude oil refineries are based. Canada is Texas's second-largest trading partner behind Mexico, with the state reliant on Canadian lumber and steel for building houses; tariffs could thus drive up the cost of homes in the state. Older Canadians who travel to Florida each year to escape cold weather may opt against visiting that state. Forty-one percent of all Canadian buyers in the U.S. have property in Florida, and given increased hostilities between the two countries, some Canadian homeowners are now looking to offload those properties. Indeed, beyond the tariffs themselves, the damage to the relationship between Americans and Canadians could have significant long-term economic effects. Trump's dismissive attitude toward Canada, and insistence on referencing the country as the 'fifty-first state,' has deeply angered Canadians. In states which rely heavily on Canadian tourists—such as Washington and Maine—increasing hostilities could discourage future travel, which in turn could weaken local economies. Bettis said that Americans were 'underestimating how angry Canadians are,' and the long-term consequences such anger will have. Should Canadian tourists boycott the United States in large numbers, it will place a significant amount of wealth at risk: The U.S. Travel Association reported that Canadians made more than 20 million visits to the United States in 2024, 'generating $20.5 billion in spending and supporting 140,000 American jobs.' In many ways, the lingering effects of a trade war with Canada may last well beyond the imposition of the tariffs themselves. 'The damage to that relationship is going to be much harder for us to negotiate and move past,' said Bettis. 'That's a real problem for us, because particularly in our border states, we have built relationships across the border and supply chains across the border that rely on open collaboration and friendliness. And when we close the door on that, then it leaves us in a very vulnerable position.'
The Guardian
14-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Throwing Muses: Moonlight Concessions review – as ever, Kristin Hersh is astonishing
Few bands have seesawed between melody and noise with as much emotional complexity as Throwing Muses, but for the alt-rock trio's 11th studio album in almost 40 years they upend everything. The guitars are mostly acoustic, the drums are shelved in favour of minimal percussion, and the lead instrument is often Pete Harvey's cello, its brooding, portent-heavy sigh the perfect accompaniment for singer/guitarist Kristin Hersh's silvery snarl. There's not a note wasted across these nine tracks, which conjure a dark, parched ambience akin to Nirvana's MTV Unplugged session: that same austerity and tension. It suits these vignettes of American subterranea – blurry but resonant snapshots of lives becoming unhemmed, with violence often on the horizon. The primal strum of South Coast plays out a noirish tale of desperation. The brooding blues of Drugstore Drastic unspools a narrative of addiction and helplessness, people 'moving weirdly slow-mo'. Throughout, Hersh remains a force of nature: ungovernable, volcanic, drawing on her own near-death experiences, trauma and inextinguishable survival instinct. On Albatross, she's 'just trying to keep us alive'. On You're Clouds' tale of love and obsession, she registers every inch of pain and madness. On the closing title track, she's a mighty storm of elemental wrath, howling of 'breaking down then cracking up', with that cello a churning undertow. As she has for four decades, Hersh persists, snarling until the last breath. The sound is, as ever, profound and thrilling.
