Amir Cohen/Reuters

Aid packages fall toward Gaza, the scene of an intensifying humanitarian crisis, after being dropped from a military aircraft, as seen from Israel's border with Gaza in southern Israel, March 5, 2024.

If the U.S. airdrops of food into Gaza that began Saturday were meant to demonstrate the Biden administration’s strength and resolve to address a deepening humanitarian crisis, for many, the intervention had the opposite effect.

The White House seemingly intended to portray President Joe Biden as a leader taking decisive action to alleviate human suffering and mass hunger approaching starvation. But international aid groups with experience in addressing conflict-caused hunger roundly criticized the airdrops as woefully inadequate – more show than solution.

Moreover, the expensive and imprecise drops of thousands of ready-to-eat meals into a sealed enclave of more than 2 million hungry people – some pallets of the first 38,000 meals dropped Saturday fell into the sea – quickly came to symbolize the American superpower’s impotence and unwillingness to impose its will on close ally Israel.

It is Israel’s 5-month-old war on Hamas following the militant group’s Oct. 7 attack in Israel that has led to Gaza’s devastation – unprecedented rates of civilian deaths, vast infrastructure destruction, and looming mass starvation. And it is Israel’s security clampdown on border crossings (along with similar actions by Egypt, another recipient of significant U.S. aid) that is at least partially responsible for the crisis.

In particular, the airdrops – a second set was carried out Tuesday – only underscore for many Mr. Biden’s refusal since the beginning of the war to take any steps that might be construed as dictating actions to Israel or imposing any restraint on its right to self-defense.

“There is a mistaken belief that the United States is able to dictate to other countries’ sovereign decisions,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said at a press briefing Thursday.

To which a range of Americans, from national security experts to members of Congress and average citizens, are responding that of course the U.S. has leverage, as Israel’s largest benefactor and supplier of military aid.

Jordan. Jordan Armed Forces/Reuters

Aid parcels to be airdropped into Gaza, in an operation being carried out with the participation of the United States, Egypt, and France, sit in the back of a cargo plane in Zarqa, Jordan, March 5, 2024.

On Sunday Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont called on President Biden to invoke the Foreign Assistance Act to demand that the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu restore humanitarian aid access to Gaza or lose U.S. military assistance.

Quoting the section of the act that bars furnishing assistance to any country that “prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance,” Senator Sanders said Israel was in “clear violation” for “prohibiting aid convoys from delivering desperately needed food and water.”

At the State Department press briefing, Mr. Miller added that the U.S. will continue to support Israel and its “legitimate right” to protect itself and pursue policies aimed at preventing anything like the Oct. 7 attacks from occurring ever again.

But he also hinted at growing daylight between the U.S. and Israel.

“Israel makes its sovereign decisions,” he said. “We make clear where we disagree with them.”

Those disagreements have largely been aired behind closed doors, although Mr. Biden did tell reporters at the White House last month that Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attacks was “over the top.”

But with polls showing that a plurality of Americans now think Israel has gone too far in its Gaza campaign, the White House appears to be getting the message and venturing into more forceful expressions of frustration with Israel.

On Sunday Vice President Kamala Harris deployed the administration’s harshest rhetoric yet, telling an audience in Selma, Alabama, that the war has caused a “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza. “The Israeli government must do more to significantly increase the flow of aid,” Ms. Harris said. “No excuses.”

Susan Walsh/AP

Protesters stand outside the White House while Vice President Kamala Harris meets with Benny Gantz, a member of Israel's wartime Cabinet and a centrist rival to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in Washington, March 4, 2024.

She also called for a cease-fire – noting a deal is “on the table” that has Israel’s backing and which would halt fighting for perhaps six weeks – echoing a demand popular with many young Democrats and Gaza supporters, but one the president has until now shied away from articulating.

The newfound willingness to display widening differences with the Netanyahu government’s conduct of the war continued Monday, when Ms. Harris received Israeli wartime Cabinet member Benny Gantz at the White House. Mr. Gantz, a centrist, is a Netanyahu rival, with polls showing he would easily trounce the conservative prime minister if elections were held now.    

The vice president underscored the need for a credible plan to reduce the risk to civilians before Israel launches any major military operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, the White House said in a statement. But there was no word of a presidential drop-in at the Harris-Gantz meeting, as some observers had speculated Mr. Biden might engineer as a way to highlight his growing frustration with Mr. Netanyahu’s conduct of the war.

As a growing number of foreign policy experts note, Mr. Biden has been great at deploying American power to support close allies in their moments of dire need, but not so good at pressuring them to change course when they falter.

As international affairs commentator Robert Wright observed in a recent column, the U.S. has “massive pressure” over Israel, but Mr. Biden has refused to use that leverage to influence a war Mr. Wright believes will ultimately not be good for Israel. (For the record, Mr. Wright says Mr. Biden is making the same mistake with Ukraine by not pressuring for an end to the war there.)

“Biden is good at showing love,” he says, “and catastrophically bad at showing tough love.”

When Pat Murphy became director of the Casa del Migrante here in 2013, the shelter exclusively served men deported from the United States.

Running a migrant shelter at the U.S.-Mexico border was challenging, he recalls, but after a few years, he settled into a routine. “I remember thinking, ‘OK, I’ve got it now. I know what to expect,’” says Padre Pat, as the Catholic priest is known.  

Sitting behind his desk in a small meeting room at the shelter, which overlooks this sprawling city, he laughs at his naiveté. Over the past several years, whom his shelter serves – and how – has transformed so frequently and dramatically that he says the only thing he “expects” now is constant change.

From evolving legal procedures at the border to the fluctuating demographics of those arriving, these shifts are forcing organizations working with migrants in Mexico to become more nimble than ever before. And as both Mexico and the U.S. prepare for presidential elections this year, immigration and border control are taking center stage in political discourse – and in policymaking.

“It’s complex because the response is always reactive,” says María Inés Barrios de la O, a professor of migration studies at the College of the Northern Border near Tijuana. “Whenever there’s a change, especially in migratory policy, it affects the flow and permanence of migratory populations. That’s a challenge squarely for civil society, because they’re the ones attending to these individuals,” she says. “Changes happen day to night, and the challenges just accelerate.” 

An open-air waiting room

Serving vulnerable populations at Mexico’s northern border has long been an exercise in flexibility. Local, national, and international policy changes – not to mention global events such as wars or pandemics – affect who is arriving, and in what numbers. There is limited government assistance and oversight for migrant services, with civil society and religious organizations often stepping in to fill gaps.

But as Padre Pat’s experience suggests, the past eight years have been a particularly complex time at the U.S.-Mexico border. He refers to the unexpected swings in “stages.”

• The arrival of new groups of foreign nationals, predominately Haitians.
• Large-scale caravans of migrants arriving from Central America.
• The 2019 Migrant Protection Protocols, known as the “Remain in Mexico” program, which returned tens of thousands of migrants back to Mexico to await court dates in the U.S.
• The COVID-19 pandemic and U.S. policies like Title 42 that essentially shuttered the border.
• The expansion of a U.S. mobile app for asylum-seekers, which has meant migrants are congregating in nonborder cities, straining support networks in new ways.

He knows there’s more on the horizon. U.S. border states such as Texas are now experimenting in their own, often severe, border enforcement. Large groups traveling north toward the U.S. started migrating together once again in the new year. Last December saw a monthly record number of U.S. Border Patrol encounters at the border. 

Mexico’s border cities have coped in diverse ways. 

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Ximena Rojas García stands with her baby boy, Enzo, in front of the health clinic, called the Refugee Health Alliance, that she co-founded in Tijuana, Mexico, to help migrants in the border city.

Over the past 40 years, Tijuana, on the traditional migratory route, has developed an infrastructure of services supported largely by churches and nongovernmental organizations, from soup kitchens to shelters like Casa Del Migrante to health clinics. 

On the other hand, until 2019, all of Ciudad Juárez, which sits across from El Paso, Texas, had only two shelters. With a reputation for high murder rates and disappearances in the early 2000s, the city wasn’t somewhere migrants or deportees eyed – or lingered. But then came policies like “Remain in Mexico.” Within five years, the number of shelters in Ciudad Juárez grew to nearly 40.

Oversight for these migrant support services is thin, and government funding – though never sizable nor consistent – has essentially disappeared under the austerity measures of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. 

For shelter directors and service providers, that means relying more on fundraising. Much of their support comes from American organizations, and increasingly over the past five years from international groups like Save the Children or the United Nations.

Meeting migrants where they are

Ximena Rojas García remembers watching with anxiety as crowds of Haitians and migrants from various African countries gathered at a Tijuana border crossing in 2016. So many of the women standing for hours exposed to the elements were pregnant or traveling with small children. Ms. Rojas wondered, who was caring for them? A trained midwife, she started showing up with jugs of water and food, and offering prenatal exams in the back of her car.

Today, Ms. Rojas has a birthing center by the beach and several clinics near the border crossing in Tijuana, part of a crossborder health NGO she co-founded in 2018 called the Refugee Health Alliance (RHA).

On a recent afternoon in an RHA clinic, a midwife crouched by a patient in the waiting room with a Haitian Creole translator at her side. She explained the woman’s lab results and handed her a prescription for a diabetes test and an antibiotic, along with two small bags of dried herbs to steep in water and drink before bed.

The clinic was relatively quiet, but that can quickly change. Ms. Rojas recalls a day in 2022 when staff couldn’t open the doors in the morning because hundreds had already lined up outside clamoring for appointments. She later learned of a rumor: that people could cross the border legally with a letter from a medical professional pledging good health.

“All of the changes at the border make families stress, and struggle for answers,” she says. “Often, we’re all guessing.” 

Although Mexico guarantees the right to health care for all migrants, regardless of legal status, the public health system is oversaturated. Whether intentionally or out of a lack of knowledge, administrators often require Mexican social security numbers or other paperwork that excludes those uprooted. 

“There’s not a single day without surprises,” says Idsel Mosqueda, a psychologist at RHA. “We work with the resources we have, and they’re limited. But we also have hope.

“There’s power in having a space where people can feel safe, heard, and seen,” she says. “Even in chaos we can ask, ‘What do you need in this moment?’”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File

A client has his taxes done at H&R Block in Boston. The IRS is rolling out the Direct File program for certain tax filers.

Individual taxpayers in the United States collectively spend 1.7 billion hours each year getting their returns ready. As the mid-April tax deadline approaches, it seems fair to ask: Does filing have to be this hard?

Given the difficulty of deciphering complicated rules and the fear of making a mistake or missing out on a deduction, many people turn to professionals or pay to use software. But this tax season, help could be on the way for certain taxpayers. The Internal Revenue Service is rolling out Direct File, a free alternative to software such as Intuit’s TurboTax. Although the pilot program has its critics, advocates see it as a step toward simplifying tax season. 

Why is filing taxes so complicated? 

A 2022 paper found that the IRS could complete nearly half of Americans’ individual tax returns using data it already has on wages, unemployment benefits, interest, dividends, capital gains, and more.

But the IRS doesn’t know everything, especially when it comes to eligibility for certain tax breaks and credits. The study found that pre-populated returns would be most accurate for filers who are single, have no dependents, don’t qualify for credits or deductions, and have less than $100,000 in wages. 

Critics say the tax preparation service industry also has a stake in keeping the process too hard for many taxpayers to navigate alone. The industry, with revenue estimated at $13.9 billion in 2023, employs nearly 270,000 people. Since 2006, Intuit has reportedly spent $25.6 million on government lobbying, and H&R Block, another provider of tax software, has spent $9.6 million. 

How does Direct File work, and what are its pros and cons?

The goal is to give taxpayers a free, easy option for filing directly to the IRS, without going through a third party. The idea has been around for years but got a boost from $15 million earmarked in the Inflation Reduction Act to explore its feasibility. 

For now, Direct File is available to residents in 12 states: Arizona, California, Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming. It works similarly to the software offered by Intuit and H&R Block, with questions that guide users through the process, plus real-time chat support from IRS representatives. But Direct File isn’t currently available to gig workers and those who itemize deductions, earn income from retirement accounts, or make more than $200,000 individually or $250,000 as a couple. And state tax returns must be completed separately.

In late January, 13 Republican attorneys general wrote to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen opposing Direct File. “American taxpayers do not want to invite the proverbial fox into the hen house,” they wrote. “There’s an obvious conflict of interest when the IRS acts as tax preparer, filer, and auditor.”

How have other countries simplified the tax-filing process?

In dozens of countries, most taxpayers don’t need to file a return. Governments withhold taxes during the year and send out information for taxpayers to review. 

SOURCE:

“Rising Income Tax Complexity,” Youssef Benzarti and Luisa Wallossek

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

“You just have to look it over, make corrections, or accept it, and you’re done,” says Joel Slemrod, an economist at the University of Michigan. As of 2021, some 33 of the 38 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development fully or partially pre-populate tax returns. 

In Spain, 70% of taxpayers receive a pre-filled return, and half make no changes. In the United Kingdom, most taxpayers don’t need to file a tax return at all under an exact-withholding system. 

Russian athletes may still be banned from competing with their national flag or anthem in this year’s Olympics. But Moscow has a plan to keep its sports institutions intact, its athletes busy and well paid, and, it hopes, Russian fans satisfied.

In September, just a month after the 2024 Paris Olympics, Russia will launch the World Friendship Games, a Soviet-inspired extravaganza that looks like a full-scale substitute games meant to defy the International Olympic Committee’s ban. Russian officials insist that it isn’t intended to replace the Olympics, but rather that Russian, Belarusian, and other voluntary international participants will compete in many Olympic categories for large cash prizes and other honors.

Nonetheless, Moscow’s decision to launch these games and several other brand-new international sporting events has generated controversy in Russia, drawn condemnation from the IOC, and offered a select number of Russian athletes a dubious choice between taking part in these patriotic events or trying to compete in Paris as “neutral” or independent contestants.

“Only a very limited number of [Russian] athletes will qualify” to compete in Paris, the IOC said in a statement in mid-December. “Among the 4,600 athletes from around the world who have qualified for Paris 2024 so far, there are only 11 Individual Neutral Athletes,” six with a Russian passport, plus five with a Belarusian passport.

And while few Russians are happy about the Olympic ban their athletes face, it is unclear whether they will find these new competitions a satisfactory replacement.

Political games

The former Soviet Union was completely isolated from global sports until 1952, when it joined the Olympic movement. Soviet athletes quickly became a regular, highly successful fixture on the international sports scene.

Then in 1984, at a particularly bad juncture of the Cold War, the USSR and its allies decided to boycott the Los Angeles Olympics to prevent their athletes from being targeted for political condemnation over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Instead, it staged a rival event, the Moscow Friendship Games, in which 50 countries participated. Few Russian sports experts today express any warm memories of those games or believe they contributed anything useful to world sports.

“You can call it anything you like, World Games or Universal Games, and offer astronomical awards, but such artificially invented competitions will never become real alternatives or drive athletes to better achievements,” says Eduard Sorokin, an independent Russian sports journalist. “At the end of the day, they will be lackluster political spectacles that have no lasting impact.”

Supporters of the alternative games include, ironically, many top Russian champions who made their names in international games and now occupy honored places in Russian society. Former NHL hockey legend Viacheslav Fetisov, now a deputy in the lower chamber of parliament with the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, accused the IOC of “trampling on the rights” of all sports fans by banning Russian athletes from competing under their own national symbols. “The IOC burned the bridges, and it’s not known what they intend to replace them with,” he told journalists.

Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP/File

Russian Kamila Valieva competes in the women's free skate program during the figure skating competition at the 2023 Russian Figure Skating Grand Prix, one of Russia's domestic competitions, at Megasport Arena in Moscow, Nov. 26, 2023.

Irina Rodnina, a three-time Olympic figure skating champion who is also a Duma deputy, said that previous Olympic bans targeted Russian athletes for alleged doping, often with good reason. Now, she told the Russian media, “there are no complaints about the athletes, but there are complaints about the country. In this situation, I do not know, maybe I am from another generation, I would not go! With a flag or without a flag, I wouldn’t go at all! Because this is humiliation of the country.”

In order to participate in the Olympics as independent competitors, Russian athletes will need to demonstrate that they have no links to military or security services and do not support the war in Ukraine, as well as be willing to forgo their Russian national affiliation. That may leave many condemned to languish without any access to world-class competitions until the global geopolitical crisis is resolved.

Experience in previous Olympics in which Russian national symbols were banned suggests that the Russian public and players alike deeply resent the limitations put upon their participants, though it is not clear whether they will embrace the alternative games being ginned up by Russian authorities.

How much do Russians care?

In addition to the World Friendship Games in Moscow and St. Petersburg, which will largely track the sporting categories of the Summer Olympics, there will be a winter version called the Winter Spartakiad, probably to be held in Sochi, site of the last Olympic Games to be hosted by Russia in 2014. Also on the drawing boards is a projected BRICS Games competition, which is aimed at drawing athletes from the Global South. Russian sports authorities have talked about making a “turn to Asia” in their competitive focus that conforms with Russia’s broader political and economic realignments.

Some Russian athletes may find a way to compete as neutrals in the Olympics and other international venues. For the rest, the alternative games offer a make-work project for athletes to continue in some kind of competition, and also to earn money to keep going.

The Kremlin has authorized a huge budget equivalent to $90 million for this year’s World Friendship Games, including around $50 million in prize money. Though Olympic-level competitors from outside the sanctioned countries of Russia and Belarus seem unlikely to attend, second-tier athletes from other countries are welcome. Organizers optimistically claim the Friendship Games may draw up to 10,000 athletes from 137 countries.

Denis Volkov, director of the Levada Center, Russia’s only independent public opinion agency, says there’s been no good polling on Russians’ feelings about being excluded from big swaths of international sports. But the subject does come up in the focus groups his agency runs, and, he reports, about half of respondents say they acutely feel the isolation. “Everyone seems sorry about it and thinks it’s a bad thing,” he says. “The bigger part [of respondents] say Russia bears no blame, and the West is just plotting against us using Ukraine as a pretext. A smaller part blames Putin.”

As for the wider sense of being shut out, at least from the Western world, Mr. Volkov says there is little evidence that Russians care very much. “Sports is one field where the isolation is felt, but in general people don’t seem very worried. It should be pointed out that only about 20% of Russians have ever traveled abroad, and that’s a small part of the urban population. When the subject comes up, a lot of people object that we’re not really isolated because we have good relations with China. And polls do show that China’s image has improved with the Russian public.”

In the final analysis, the alternative games may keep Russian athletics on life support, at least for now.

“These alternative games cannot possibly substitute for the Olympics, but at least athletes will be able to compete and achieve some of their goals,” says Alexander Shprygin, a controversial sports commentator and former sports adviser to the right-wing, populist Liberal Democratic Party. “So the main purpose is to support the athletes, not to please the fans. All of them, athletes and fans alike, are just hostages of the political situation.”

Editor’s note: The story has been updated to clarify the number of Russian athletes who have the choice to attend international competitions like the Olympics.

AP

Photos show Xochitl Galvez, at left, and Claudia Sheinbaum, the two main presidential candidates in the June election.

Few countries have achieved greater political gains for women in recent decades than Mexico. Half of the Cabinet and national legislature is female. So are the country’s chief justice and a third of all state governors. In a landmark ruling last fall, the Supreme Court decriminalized abortion.

Now the country is poised to elect its first female president. The two leading candidates for the June ballot come from contrasting circumstances. Claudia Sheinbaum was raised in affluence by immigrant parents. Xóchitl Gálvez, who is ethnically Indigenous, grew up poor. Their personal differences, however, resonate less than their professional qualifications.

Both women are trained scientists with successful political careers. They eschew personal attacks and emphasize equality and compassion. Between them, they have garnered support from 90% of voters. In a country where 70% of women have experienced some form of violence, many Mexicans glimpse a future beyond fear and limitation.

This is “a historic moment: cheering on our future president, who is, moreover, a scientist,” Brenda Suarez, a shopkeeper, told Le Monde during Ms. Sheinbaum’s election kickoff in Mexico City last Friday. “My two daughters already see Claudia as a role model.” 

Mexico’s contest between two leading female presidential candidates reflects a continuing shift in attitudes – fueled partly by quotas – about gender equality in Latin America. Twelves countries in the region have been led by women. While gender gaps persist, a 2021 Gallup poll found that strong majorities – ranging from 75% to 92% – in every country of the region expected to see a female head of state within a decade. Across the region, a median average of 46% expressed a preference for female managers in their jobs.

These attitudes reflect widening recognition and respect for the qualities and qualifications that women bring to leadership. As Jennifer Piscopo, a professor of gender and politics at the University of London, has observed, in Latin America, voters tend to associate women with political renewal and trust. “As the group traditionally excluded from political power, women often signal a fresh start and then repudiation of corrupt elites, making them more attractive candidates.”

On the campaign trail, Ms. Sheinbaum, the ruling party candidate, and Ms. Gálvez outline economic and security proposals that differ by degrees. But their stump messages align on seeking justice for all Mexicans, protection for women, and honest governance over corruption.

“In a country where women – especially minority women – struggle to survive, Gálvez and Sheinbaum studied science, shaped policy, and crafted resumes worthy of presidential bids,” Professor Piscopo wrote last week in Ms. Magazine.  “The symbolism is huge,” she told the Financial Times.