“Netanyahu’s purpose was to drag Trump in,” Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, says of the U.S. attack on Iran. Over the weekend, the U.S. directly joined the war between Israel and Iran when it bombed three nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, though it’s unclear how far the strikes have set back the Iranian nuclear program. Israel and the United States accuse Iran of developing nuclear weapons, while Iran says its program is for civilian use. United Nations inspectors and U.S. intelligence assessments have said Iran is not building weapons. “The danger now is that, having brought the U.S. into this, Israel will seek to go further up the escalatory ladder,” says Levy. “It wants the chaos.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

We get an update on ongoing ceasefire negotiations between Hamas and Israel from former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy. The latest proposal, mediated by U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, “walks back the commitment for a permanent ceasefire, Israeli withdrawal and allowing in of humanitarian aid.” It’s a bad deal for the Palestinians that will allow Israel to continue its ethnic cleansing of Gaza, says Levy. Meanwhile, families of Israeli hostages are protesting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s delays in securing a deal as he works toward “permanent war” and the eventual annexation of Gaza. “None of this would be possible if so much of the Israeli media and society was not mobilized in support of this, and none of that would be possible if Israel wasn’t treated with impunity.” Levy also responds to the latest massacre of Palestinians at an aid site operated by the U.S.-Israeli aid initiative, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Li, 58, who previously served as assistant commerce minister during U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term, has been named as China’s International Trade Representative and Vice Minister of Commerce, according to China’s Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security.

Li most recently represented China at the World Trade Organization.

It was unclear if Wang, 59, who assumed the No. 2 role at the commerce ministry in 2022, had taken up a post elsewhere. His name was no longer on the ministry’s leadership team.

The ministry did not immediately respond to a Radio Free Asia request for comment on the change.

Li, who studied in Germany, previously served in senior roles at China’s Ministry of Commerce, including as Deputy Director-General in both the trade and legal departments. He became Assistant Minister of Commerce in 2016.

In 2021, he was appointed China’s Ambassador to the World Trade Organization and also served as deputy representative to the U.N. in Geneva and other international bodies in Switzerland.

“The unilateralist approach of the U.S. blatantly violates WTO rules, exacerbates economic uncertainty, disrupts global trade and may even subvert the rules-based multilateral trading system,” Li said at a February WTO meeting in Geneva.

“China firmly opposes this and urges the United States to abolish its wrongful practices,” he said, warning that such moves have triggered “tariff shocks” to the world.

The decision comes as trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies continue to escalate. Since early April, the U.S. and China have been locked in a cycle of retaliatory tariffs.

On Wednesday, the White House announced that an “up to 245%” tariff has been imposed on Chinese imports due to China’s “retaliatory actions.”

“The ball is in China’s court. China needs to deal with us. We don’t have to make a deal with them,” the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, said at a press briefing Wednesday.

The appointment also comes amid Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Southeast Asia tour, where he ramped up rhetoric of unity in the face of protectionism and shocks to the global order.

At a state dinner in Putrajaya with Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, Xi said China would work with regional partners to counter global instability.

“In the face of shocks to global order and economic globalization, China and Malaysia will stand with countries in the region to combat the undercurrents of geopolitical confrontation, as well as the counter-currents of unilateralism and protectionism,” Xi said.

China promised, Xi said, to offer greater market access to Malaysia and Vietnam.

“Together we will safeguard the bright prospects of our Asian family,” he said.

Edited by Taejun Kang and Stephen Wright.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Alan Lu for RFA.

We continue our coverage of the long-awaited Gaza ceasefire by going to Jerusalem to speak with Israeli activist Gershon Baskin, who has experience negotiating with Hamas, including during this latest conflict. Baskin says while it’s heartening to see captives returning home, the ceasefire agreement is “a bad deal” because of how fragile it is. “Hamas would not have agreed to enter into this two- or three-phase deal without having guarantees … that in fact the war would end,” says Baskin. “But we don’t know that, because Netanyahu has given alternative promises to members of the government that Israel reserves the right to return to war.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Gaza is entering its second winter under attack from Israel, and talks to reach a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas appear to have stalled yet again. For more on efforts to end the war and secure the release of captives on both sides, we speak with veteran Israeli negotiator Gershon Baskin, who has acted as a backchannel to Hamas leaders in the current and previous conflicts. “We need to put the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the agenda again and make sure this is the last war we fight,” says Baskin.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

As Israeli forces launch repeated attacks on civilian areas in Gaza, expand their deadly incursion into the West Bank and threaten retaliation for strikes by Hezbollah and Houthis, we discuss ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas with Palestinian writer Amjad Iraqi and former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy. Despite apparent divisions among Israeli leadership over the terms of an acceptable deal — if such a deal even exists — all of the Israeli proposals are “united by an assumption that Israel is going to be maintaining overarching control of the Gaza Strip,” says Iraqi. Meanwhile, in the United States, what Levy calls “the Biden administration’s slavish devotion to running cover” for Israel’s genocidal assault is threatening the Democratic Party’s attempt to hold onto executive power after the upcoming presidential election.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejects growing domestic and international calls to accept a Gaza ceasefire deal, we go to Jerusalem to speak to Gershon Baskin of the human rights advocacy group International Communities Organization. Baskin has spent years as a back-channel Israeli negotiator with Hamas in ceasefire deals, including throughout Israel’s current war on Gaza. “It’s very clear that Netanyahu doesn’t want to end the war,” says Baskin, who calls for all remaining stakeholders, including Hamas, the United States and Israeli protesters, to increase pressure on the defiant prime minister.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The United States, Qatar and Egypt are urging Israel and Hamas to hold a new round of negotiations to finalize a ceasefire deal in Gaza. However, Hamas is urging mediators to enforce the ceasefire terms proposed by President Biden in May that Hamas already agreed to and that Israel rejected. Daniel Levy, president of the U.S./Middle East Project and a former Israeli peace negotiator under Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin, says U.S.-led efforts for a ceasefire are likely to fail as long as the Biden administration remains unwilling to pressure Israel. “It’s quite clear Netanyahu does not want a ceasefire deal,” says Levy, who adds that the Washington playbook of unlimited support for Israel and threats to keep other regional actors in line could pull the U.S. into a wider Middle East war. “America is playing the role as a member of the axis of Zionist extremism.”

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Former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy discusses ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas, the ruling party in the Gaza Strip, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s continued hostility to compromise and the Biden administration’s ineffectual mediation. Contrary to its claims of brokering peace, the U.S. “will continue to send the weapons” Israel uses to devastate Gaza, unremittingly fueling an increasingly unpopular war, says Levy, who is now president of the U.S./Middle East Project.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Even after Hamas accepted a Gaza ceasefire proposal Monday, Israeli forces moved in with tanks to seize the Rafah crossing with Egypt. Israel says the ceasefire deal falls short of its demands, and Hamas has called for “international intervention.” Former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy says the limited information and political maneuvering of all parties raises more questions than answers right now, but the core issue is whether all parties can maintain a sustained end to hostilities. “In addition to testing each other, the Hamas and Israeli parties are testing the United States of America and the Biden administration in an unprecedented way,” says Levy. “Hamas detects that the U.S. may finally be serious about offering a sustained calm.” While Levy says growing external pressure from global protests are “having an impact,” he doubts U.S. and Israeli leaders feel they must change course yet. “The pressure does not feel sufficient that Netanuahu’s politics needs him to accept a ceasefire. He still thinks he can wiggle out of this,” says Levy. “If this deal doesn’t go through, I fear we’re in for the much longer haul.”

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As Benjamin Netanyahu faces mass protests at home and increasing diplomatic pressure abroad, we speak with Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator and president of the U.S./Middle East Project. He says Netanyahu is desperate to save his political prospects, primarily by continuing the war on Gaza for as long as possible and undercutting ceasefire talks. “Prime Minister Netanyahu needs this war to continue and is willing and has already gone to extreme lengths to do so,” says Levy, who faults the Biden administration for not applying any real pressure on him. “Stop telling me that Netanyahu is a problem. You’re the problem, because you’re the enabler, you’re the facilitator.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

We speak with former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy about ongoing efforts to reach another truce in Gaza after four months of intense Israeli bombardment and siege. Hamas has put forward a counterproposal to a U.S.-backed Israeli plan that includes a three-phase ceasefire over 135 days where Hamas would release all hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. Hamas is also calling for a permanent ceasefire and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza — demands Israel has so far opposed. A successful ceasefire and wider regional stability depends on U.S. actions “to create circumstances in which Israel has hard choices to make,” says Levy. “America is apparently willing to risk being further entangled yet again in Middle East wars because it is unwilling to stare down an Israeli leader … who is insistent on maintaining his apartheid regime.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Meanwhile, Kyiv and Moscow continued to dispute the circumstances surrounding the January 24 crash of a Russian military transport plane that the Kremlin claimed was carrying Ukrainian prisoners of war.

Kyiv said it has no proof POWs were aboard and has not confirmed its forces shot down the plane.

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine

RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's full-scale invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

General Oleksandr Tarnavskiy, the Ukrainian commander in the Tavria zone in the Zaporizhzhya region, said Russian forces had "significantly increased" the number of offensive and assault operations over the past two days.

"For the second day in a row, the enemy has conducted 50 combat clashes daily,” he wrote on Telegram.

"Also, the enemy has carried out 100 air strikes in the operational zone of the Tavria Joint Task Force within seven days," he said, adding that 230 Russian-launched drones had been "neutralized or destroyed" over the past day in the area.

Battlefield claims on either side cannot immediately be confirmed.

Earlier, the Ukrainian military said 98 combat clashes took place between Ukrainian troops and the invading Russian army over the past 24 hours.

"There are dead and wounded among the civilian populations," the Ukrianian military's General Staff said in its daily update, but did not provide further details about the casualties.

According to the General Staff, Russian forces launched eight missile and four air strikes, and carried out 78 attacks from rocket-salvo systems on Ukrainian troop positions and populated areas. Iranian-made Shahed drones and Iskander ballistic missiles were used in the attacks, it said.

A number of "high-rise residential buildings, schools, kindergartens, a shopping center, and other civilian infrastructure were destroyed or damaged" in the latest Russian strikes, the bulletin said.

"More than 120 settlements came under artillery fire in the Chernihiv, Sumy, Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhya, Dnipropetrovsk, Kherson, and Mykolayiv regions," according to the daily update.

The General Staff also reported that Ukrainian defenders repelled dozens of Russian assaults in eight directions, including Avdiyivka, Bakhmut, Maryinka, and Kupyansk in the eastern Donetsk region.

Meanwhile, Kyrylo Budanov, chief of Ukrainian military intelligence, said it remained unclear what happened in the crash of the Russian Il-76 that the Kremlin claimed was carrying 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war who were killed along with nine crew members.

The Kremlin said the military transport plane was shot down by a Ukrainian missile despite the fact that Russian forces had alerted Kyiv to the flight’s path.

Ukrainian military intelligence spokesman Andriy Yusov told RFE/RL that it had not received either a written or verbal request to secure the airspace where the plane went down.

The situation with the crash of the aircraft "is not yet fully understood,” Budanov said.

"It is necessary to determine what happened – unfortunately, neither side can fully answer that yet."

Russia "of course, has taken the position of blaming Ukraine for everything, despite the fact that there are a number of facts that are inconsistent with such a position," he added.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has insisted Ukraine shot down the plane and said an investigation was being carried out, with a report to be made in the upcoming days.

In Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy announced the creation of a second body to assist businesses in the war-torn country.

Speaking in his nightly video address late on January 26, Zelenskiy said the All-Ukraine Economic Platform would help businesses overcome the challenges posed by Russia's nearly two-year-old invasion.

On January 23, Zelenskiy announced the formation of a Council for the Support of Entrepreneurship, which he said sought to strengthen the country's economy and clarify issues related to law enforcement agencies. Decrees creating both bodies were published on January 26.

Ukraine's economy has collapsed in many sectors since Russia invaded the country in February 2022. Kyiv heavily relies on international aid from its Western partnes.

The Voice of America reported that the United States vowed to promote at the international level a peace formula put forward by Zelenskiy.

VOA quoted White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby as saying that Washington "is committed to the policy of supporting initiatives emanating from the leadership of Ukraine."

Zelenskiy last year presented his 10-point peace formula that includes the withdrawal of Russian forces and the restoration of Ukrainian territorial integrity, among other things.

With reporting by Reuters and dpa

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. This story was co-published with The Desert Sun.

John Brooks Hamby was 9 years old the last time a group of Western states renegotiated how they share the dwindling Colorado River. When the high-stakes talks concluded two years later, in 2007, with a round of painful cuts, he hadn’t reached high school.

Yet this June an audience of water policy experts listened with rapt attention as Hamby, now 27, recited lessons from those deliberations.

Hamby, California’s boyish-looking representative on issues concerning the river, sat shoulder-to-shoulder with the other states’ powerful water managers, many of whom have decades of experience, an almost uncomfortable sight given their latest brawl over the beleaguered Colorado River. The group had gathered in a mock courtroom at the University of Colorado Law School to discuss water law and to field questions about their negotiations over shortages that have prompted some cities to restrict growth and farmers to fallow fields.

The moderator asked whether states would allow Native American tribes in the basin, who have often been denied the water they were guaranteed by treaties and court rulings, to have an equal say in these decisions, referencing a question posed earlier by the governor of the Gila River Indian Community, a tribe in Arizona. Hamby jumped to offer a noncommittal answer about involving tribes in “effective conversations” before pivoting to a discussion of how, during the 2007 negotiations, smaller working groups had allowed the states and other water users to effectively iron out potential impasses.

The only other state delegate to respond endorsed Hamby’s answer, a sign of how quickly he has risen to the top of the river’s ranks. Hamby — who goes by J.B. — is the youngest of the Colorado River’s “water buffaloes,” as the water managers who set policy are known.

While his counterparts from the other basin states — Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — worked their way through water agencies or weathered the shifting politics of various governors, Hamby’s ascent was swift. In a three-year span, he rose from a recent Stanford University graduate, with a resume that touted little beyond a history degree and internships with Uber and a senator, to vice president of the Imperial Irrigation District board and chair of the Colorado River Board of California. The former post gave him sway over the single largest user of Colorado River water, and the latter made him California’s interstate negotiator for issues affecting the river basin.

Combined, these roles position Hamby as arguably the most powerful person involved in talks on the future of the Colorado River, a waterway that is relied upon by an estimated 35 million people and supports about $1.4 trillion worth of commerce.

They also place him at the center of the river’s most consequential moment since midcentury, when Arizona and California went to the Supreme Court to fight over the amount of water they were allocated. Now the river’s users must agree to dramatic cuts, as the river has been diminished by climate change and drought. It’s a task that demands Hamby both protect California’s long-standing water rights and lead all seven basin states to collaborate on a resolution, even though they’ll all have to give ground.

Hamby holds the trump card. The Law of the River — the compacts, laws and court rulings that govern how the river is allocated — reflects a time when water use was encouraged to bring settlers west. And court decisions have favored users with senior priority rights, meaning those who were first to plant stakes along the river, file claims in county recorders’ offices and prove their claims by taking water before federal and state water laws were codified. Those with such rights are legally entitled to receive their share of the river before the next person or agency in line receives any. The Imperial Irrigation District holds some of the basin’s oldest rights, dating back to 1901.

Hamby defends this system, which allows the Imperial Valley — home to only half of a percent of the river’s users, Hamby included — to control about a quarter of the river’s flow. That’s more than 10 times southern Nevada’s allocation and more than the entire state of Arizona receives. A recent ProPublica and Desert Sun analysis found that 20 valley farming families use about 387 billion gallons of cheap water annually, most of it to grow cattle feed, and one family uses more water than the entire Las Vegas metropolitan area.

Even so, Hamby can only go so far in dictating the terms of basinwide cuts. Strictly adhering to the century-old status quo would be catastrophic, as it would continue decades of overuse and could cut off the supply to millions of people in lower-priority cities and reservations. But if Hamby concedes too much to the other states, he risks costing California by upending the historical agreements that put the Golden State at the front of the line.

As an IID director, he must protect the priority system preferred by farmers who use most of the river and fear the cities eyeing their share. As California’s negotiator, he also represents cities like Los Angeles and San Diego as well as oft-overlooked tribes.

“Water is power. Water is control. So why would anyone want to give that up, to give it away to somebody else?” said Kyle Roerink, a Nevada environmentalist who runs the Great Basin Water Network and has joined unlikely coalitions with Hamby fighting the region’s seemingly endless urban growth.

If the basin states can’t find agreement, then the Law of the River reigns supreme, Hamby told ProPublica and The Desert Sun earlier this year. “That is the law, which everybody agreed to.” California is ready to compromise on cuts, he added, “but we need to see something come from the other states.”

Hamby grew up among the hot Imperial Valley farms and picked up the region’s “us against the world” mentality that flourishes alongside alfalfa, livestock and leafy greens. In California, dreams only go as far as water allows, and the valley’s farmers live in constant fear that cities are lusting after the water that sustains the local economy.

In the Imperial Valley, locals’ bona fides rest on how many generations back their family arrived in this hardscrabble desert. Hamby’s great-grandfather “came here with $10 in his pocket on the back of a freight train from Big Spring, Texas,” as Hamby tells it, and worked as a ditch digger before starting a beekeeping business. His family has remained in the agriculture industry.

Hamby’s father has held various gigs, from helping develop a farm in China (to the dismay of some Imperial Valley growers) to his current business growing seeds. And his mother worked on water issues from a different angle, serving as a county environmental health specialist, including focusing on the pollution that flowed through the valley via the New River.

If his family had a successful farm to pass on, Hamby, who was active in 4-H as a teenager, said he would’ve embraced that career path. “There’s been repeated struggle, and dreams will be built up and dashed and broken,” Hamby said of his family history. Instead, he looked for other ways to shape the valley.

Despite his agrarian upbringing, he had an origin story to launch him into conservative politics, if only he wanted that path.

In 2014, Hamby was to give a speech at his graduation as the salutatorian of his Brawley Union High School class. But he had chosen to write an address about his Christian faith, to which school administrators objected, he said, forcing the teenager to rewrite it multiple times.

At the ceremony, he stepped to the lectern, the hot desert wind jostling his tassel and waving a line of American flags at his back. “Congratulations, class of 2014,” Hamby concluded, his words echoing over the sound system. “Thank you, and may the God of the Bible bless you, each and every one of you, every day of the rest of your life.”

The crowd cheered. Right-wing outlets including Fox News featured stories of a student standing up to what they saw as censors, dubbing him a “red-blooded, Constitution-loving American.” He was interviewed on national television about his stand for Christian religious liberty.

But something kept pulling Hamby toward battles grounded less in identity politics and more in the day to day. Exactly how he came to combine water and politics wasn’t entirely clear to him as he sat in a Mexican restaurant in the Imperial Valley town of El Centro earlier this year.

Asked if the fight over his graduation speech was the beginning of his story in politics, he pushed back. “Lives are very complicated and long,” he offered.

Even if he saw himself becoming a farmer, political ambition has propelled Hamby his entire life.

His mother told a local reporter that he had wanted to be mayor at 5 years old. At 17, he earned a three-week posting as a page for Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat. In college, he interned for Sen. Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican. In 2019, he was appointed by the county board of supervisors to a local community advisory council.

Hamby, who said he’s registered to vote without a party preference, continuously sought out bigger causes.

While in college, Hamby was involved with political groups, including, among others, the Stanford College Republicans and an anti-abortion organization. As he waded into the university’s archives, it became clearer where he wanted to focus his ambitions.

Hamby voraciously read about the West’s battles over water, marveling at the papers of Northcutt Ely, a storied water attorney who argued the Supreme Court case Arizona v. California on the latter’s behalf, and Ray Lyman Wilbur, a former secretary of the interior who oversaw construction of the Hoover Dam.

Asked how he felt living in the archives while some of his college compatriots partied, Hamby quipped, “Well, you could only be in the archives in the daytime. There were other opportunities in the nighttime, which I did not exploit.”

Roerink, the environmentalist, compared Hamby to the historical figures he studied who fought to protect the system that has guaranteed California’s water. “Northcutt Ely and J.B. are saying a lot of the same things, that development elsewhere ultimately impacts the rights of California,” he said.

In a Facebook post celebrating his graduation from Stanford, Hamby included a picture of himself smiling, diploma in hand, alongside a quote from John Wesley Powell, the one-armed explorer who led the first U.S.-sponsored expedition down the Colorado River and tried to help shape early American policy along the waterway, arguing that there wasn’t enough water to support mass Western expansion.

“We are now ready to start on our way down the Great Unknown,” Hamby quoted from Powell’s musings on the river. “Our boats, tied to a common stake, are chafing each other, as they are tossed by the fretful river.”

Four months later, Hamby announced his candidacy for the Imperial Irrigation District’s board of directors.

In an ad for the 2020 race, Hamby stares into the camera and shakes his fist. “Imperial Valley’s water belongs to all of us, and it belongs here,” he says. Big cities are trying to take the valley’s water and other water managers will allow that via “backroom political deals,” Hamby says in the video. But he would protect the precious resource if elected.

Hamby’s message struck a chord.

He had studied recent successful political movements: populist Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s election, the Labour Party’s landslide 1997 win in Great Britain and the conservative pro-Brexit campaign in 2016.

He was particularly inspired by the notorious big red bus that toured the United Kingdom, spreading the message that the country was spending huge sums to prop up the European Union — a persuasive argument that was a lie. He also took note of environmentalists using a giant mobile bucket to protest an attempt to move water from rural Nevada to Las Vegas. Hamby rented a flatbed, mounted a massive pipe on the back and had it driven around the Imperial Valley. The insinuation: This is how San Diego will buy and siphon off your water.

“People immediately got it, especially when you had a 30-, 40-foot pipe marauding around the area,” Hamby said.

He vowed to hold a public referendum before any more Colorado River water was moved out of the valley. Hamby later led the charge to secure $250 million in federal funds if the irrigation district temporarily cut its use of river water, despite an outcry from farmers and environmental groups who only had 24 hours to review the plan before the board voted on it. No referendum has been held.

Asked if he had broken his campaign promise, Hamby said that he is working to enshrine public input in district policy and that “we’re not moving water to any other places. We’re maintaining it in the system to be able to protect our sole source and supply.”

He also made stylistic changes as he entered the political arena. He started going by J.B. because it sounds more “iconic,” he told a podcaster, and because potential voters were getting confused by the name Brooks, he told ProPublica and The Desert Sun. And he refined his look. He’s clean-shaven and sports a high and tight haircut. His wardrobe could be described as “corporate outing meets Western wear,” often including a turquoise bolo tie and the IID crest, which features a crown adorning a shield, pinned to his lapel.

During his campaign, Hamby faced questions about his inexperience and choice to run in a district other than the one where he was raised. “JB is still a KID. JB needs a JOB. DON’T give him your VOTE. IID DIRECTOR should not be one’s first JOB out of college,” one constituent commented online, according to the Imperial Valley Press, a local newspaper that covered the race.

Still, Hamby was the top vote-getter in the primary, beating an incumbent who cast the deciding vote on a controversial 2003 agreement that transferred a portion of the valley’s water to cities to help get California back within its allotment. Many of the valley’s large, wealthy farming families supported Hamby’s campaign, which brought in more than $100,000, including loans from his father’s company.

Hamby garnered nearly two-thirds of the general election vote. He had a mandate to defend the valley’s water rights.

Hamby’s time on the board got off to a combative start. While waiting to be seated, he showed up at board meetings, publicly calling on members to avoid making important decisions until the new members were seated. He and another newly elected director skipped the district’s official swearing-in and held their own due to a disagreement over who could attend amid COVID-19 restrictions.

When the outgoing board signed a sweeping project labor agreement with Southern California unions days before Hamby took office, he engineered a strategy to rip it up by declaring that the motion to approve it was ambiguous and voting to nullify it. That move led to litigation, which was resolved when the district accepted a modified agreement.

Over time, as he confronted problems that would take collaboration to solve, Hamby’s tone changed. The board, which has a history of dysfunction, confronted issues ranging from mandatory water conservation that is shrinking the Salton Sea — a terminal lake fed by irrigation runoff that is now exposing communities to toxic dust as water levels fall and uncover the lakebed — to a powerful farmer who has been battling in court to break the irrigation district’s control over water.

Many of Hamby’s colleagues, including fellow Director Javier Gonzalez, praised the young director’s leadership. “He’s a hard worker,” Gonzalez said. “He gets things done.”

The rewards of the job are less financial and more the ability to pursue policy goals. The irrigation district’s directors make around $50,000 annually. Hamby drives an aging Toyota Prius and says he lives in a “bachelor apartment.” But even with his work ethic, there were limits to how much Hamby could deliver on his campaign promises to keep the district’s water in the Imperial Valley.

To do that, he needed to be at the table with the basin’s water buffaloes.

Power in the Colorado River Basin lies largely with the seven states and their designated representatives now haggling over cuts to water allocations.

The Colorado River Board of California is the state’s representative. Gov. Gavin Newsom appointed Hamby to the board a few months after he was sworn in at the irrigation district.

Less than two years later, the chair, who acts as the state’s negotiator, unexpectedly announced he wouldn’t seek reelection.

The board is split between representatives of rural water districts that largely serve farmers and urban water districts serving Los Angeles, San Diego and other cities. A member of the San Diego County Water Authority board emerged as the cities’ candidate for chair, with Hamby as the preference of the rural irrigation districts. Neither candidate had enough votes to win, and some of Hamby’s earlier brash remarks left an older water manager feeling uneasy about voting for him.

Glen Peterson, who was then the board’s representative from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which serves 19 million people, was considering supporting Hamby but “had concerns” about his public statements. After a frank conversation between the two and some maneuvering with other board members, the votes shifted.

“I think he’s a wonderful kid. And he’s really smart and, for his age, he is extremely mature,” Peterson said. “I mean, this guy probably sat at the big people’s table when he was a teenager.”

Hamby was elected the new chair, overseeing California’s negotiations with the rest of the basin states.

“Traditionally, it’s been, ‘You hold the role and then you die in it,’” Hamby explained. “IID’s had three people hold the position before. The previous three died in the role.” (The chair of the board now serves four-year terms, but there is no limit on the number of terms.)

When asked what happens next on the river, where he would’ve once brought rhetorical fire and brimstone, he now offers coded responses. “I need to develop truly consensus-based approaches to develop a new set of operating guidelines and standards that everybody can agree on, because there’s necessity,” he said.

With aggressive conservation efforts already underway in some parts of the Colorado River Basin, policymakers are realizing that ripping out lawns and installing low-flow toilets in metropolitan areas won’t be enough to save the river. Agriculture uses an estimated three-quarters or more of the river, meaning any solution must include cuts to farmers’ allocations and a rethinking of the long-protected priority system.

That puts IID and California, with their senior water rights, at odds with the rest of the basin.

In January 2023, facing a federal deadline to come up with a plan to cut water use, the other six basin states released a joint letter detailing their idea to conserve water. California, which potentially faced the heaviest cuts, was the only state not to sign onto the plan.

“Compromise really wasn’t in the air at the time,” Hamby said.

A day later, the Colorado River Board of California, with Hamby at the helm, rushed to release its own plan. The board flexed California’s water rights, arguing in a statement that the other states’ proposal “conflicts with the existing Law of the River” and undermines the priority system.

In the ensuing weeks, Hamby made it known that the other states’ methodology for saving water, which put California at a disadvantage, was untenable.

“That moment looked like the example of him digging in his heels,’” said Elizabeth Koebele, an associate professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno who studies the river's governance. She added, “We did see the power of California and the role that their legal position plays on the river.”

But unless Hamby were willing to exercise the nuclear option and test the strength of California’s legal position in court, he’d have to give up something to protect water rights in the state.

He embraced diplomacy, writing thank-you notes to other states’ representatives and beginning to broker a new plan among the Lower Basin states: California, Arizona and Nevada. In it, they agreed to apportion short-term cuts — importantly, without changing the priority system or water accounting in the long run — until a new set of rules and agreements could be hammered out. That new plan is due by the end of 2026.

“There’s still certainly an argument that he’s making that’s based on protecting as much Colorado River agricultural water as possible, but there’s this shift that’s happening,” Koebele said, adding that Hamby and California seem to be embracing a “realization that simply arguing ‘Our water rights are senior’ is not going to save agriculture.”

Other water leaders, both in California and around the basin, have acknowledged Hamby’s diplomatic approach. Even Arizona, which has traditionally been California’s staunchest rival on the river, took notice.

“J.B. has exhibited a real progressive, collaborative spirit in our discussions,” Tom Buschatzke, the director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources and the state’s representative, wrote in an email. “He is a very measured, calm person who is clearly very intelligent.”

Hamby acknowledged he’s evolved on the job from “a very eager young 23-year-old” to someone more focused on compromise as his position in river negotiations grew.

But a temporary harmony along the river isn’t a guarantee he’ll remain in good standing with voters in the Imperial Valley. Even as he’s working with colleagues across the basin, Hamby still must contend with local politics and strike a balance between finding agreement with the other basin states and protecting the favorable status quo.

Some of the valley’s farmers have privately voiced dissatisfaction with Hamby and the district, and one former local politician said he was asked to consider challenging Hamby in next year’s election.

Hamby also received a cryptic death threat in the mail earlier this year, in which the sender, allegedly frustrated with the handling of the Colorado River, suggested he be shot.

But he shrugged off that incident too as just someone sending him “a nice notecard.” All paths forward on the river go through Hamby, and there were more pressing water policy questions — and potential solutions to the river’s woes — that he wanted to discuss instead.

“I’ve been accused of being optimistic,” he said.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Mark Olalde, ProPublica, and Janet Wilson, The Desert Sun.

According to the latest update from the Israeli military, Hamas is still holding at least 229 hostages captured during its October 7 incursion into southern Israel. The group has stated that they will not release all hostages until Israel agrees to a ceasefire in Gaza. To discuss the release thus far of four hostages and prospects for future releases, we speak to Gershon Baskin, who helped negotiate a critical hostage exchange between Israel and Hamas in 2011. “I really think this is some kind of negotiating game and competition that exists featuring Qatar and Egypt,” says Baskin.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

President Biden will visit Israel on Wednesday in an unprecedented show of support for the country following last week’s surprise attack by Hamas that killed over 1,400 Israelis, including many civilians. The United States continues to rush ammunition, air defenses and other weaponry to Israel ahead of a possible Israeli ground invasion of Gaza. To end this conflict, former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy says, the U.S. must change course to end Israel’s impunity toward Palestinians. If Biden refuses to recognize Palestinian suffering, “then he is, by sins of omission, encouraging the kind of … genocidal language that is proliferating right now and that is incredibly dangerous to everyone,” says Levy.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Free Papua Organisation (OPM) leader Jeffrey Bomanak has appealed for Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape to become a “neutral intermediary” to negotiate between the Indonesian government and the West Papuan rebels holding a New Zealand pilot hostage for his release.

He has called in a statement today for the safe transfer of 37-year-old Philip Mehrtens, a flight captain working for Indonesia’s Susi Air who was seized at a remote airstrip in the central highlands on February 7, to a “secure location in Papua New Guinea”.

If Prime Minister Marape could not “come to the assistance of Captain Mehrtens”, Bomanak requested another PNG politician instead “because we are both Melanesian people”.

• READ MORE: Author-poet condemns Papuan rebel threat to shoot NZ hostage pilot if denied talks
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“We would be very comfortable with [MPs] Belden Namah, Lhuter Wengge, Gary Juffa, or Powes Parkop. We trust them.”

In February, the PNG government successfully resolved a hostage crisis by negotiating freedom for three captives, including a NZ professor living in Australia.

This was one of three points cited in the OPM statement needed to “end the hostage crisis peacefully”.

“However, more miracles will be required for Indonesia to cease the genocide of my people, the destruction of our land and homes, and the plunder of our spectacular natural resources,” Bomanak added.

Two other conditions
The other two OPM conditions for a peaceful resolution are:

• The Indonesian government must “open up” and talk to the OPM as the official political body of the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB); and
• Cease air and ground bombing and combat operations, and withdraw all Indonesian defence and security forces from all conflict areas.

Clarifying a TPNPB video released yesterday that purported to show Mehrtens saying that if negotiations on independence for West Papua did not start within two months he was at risk of being shot by the rebels seeking independence for the Melanesian region, Bomanak blamed the Indonesian authorities over the impasse.

“If the Indonesian government continues to carry out military operations and the New Zealand government does not take persuasive steps, the OPM will not be held responsible when something happens to the life of Captain pilot Philip Mehrtens as a result of the ongoing air and ground combat operations by Indonesia’s defence forces.”

Bomanak called on the Jakarta government to have compassion, adding: “Unfortunately, when there are six decades of Indonesia’s crimes against my people, to think Jakarta can act in any way compassionate is almost [an] impossible expectation. It would be a miracle!”

The OPM fighters have been struggling in a low-level insurgency for independence from Indonesia since 1969.

However, the struggle has gained a new intensity in the past five years with more sophisticated weapons and strategies. This has coincided with mounting peaceful civil resistance to Indonesian rule.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.