This Is the Year When Tourism in Israel Died. Where Do We Go From Here?

Masada is perhaps the most painful example, and also perfectly exemplifies the present situation. The clifftop site by the Dead Sea is enchanting at the highest international level. It features ancient royal palaces, stories of heroism, breathtaking views, and dozens of nearby hotels with spas – all in the lowest place in the world.
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Thanksgiving record travel expected for 2024

Thanksgiving TravelAdd TopicThe American Automobile Association (AAA) projects 79.9 million people will travel 50 miles or more from their home for Thanksgiving between Tuesday, Nov. 26, 2024, and Monday, Dec. 2, 2024, which is 1.7 million higher compared to last year and 2 million more than in 2019.Greg Lovett, Palm Beach Post Via USA TODAY NetworkAAA projects a record 71.7 million people will travel by car over Thanksgiving.Mario Tama, Getty ImagesLow gas prices are expected to fuel the record travel in 2024 as the national average could get below $3.00 for the first time since 2021.Michael Clubb, South Bend Tribune Via USA TODAY NetworkAAA projects a record 5.84 million people will fly domestically over Thanksgiving.Chip Somodevilla, Getty ImagesNearly 2.3 million people are expected to travel by other modes of transportation, including buses, cruises, and trains.Kevin Dietsch, Getty ImagesDomestic and international cruise bookings are up 20% in 2024 compared to last Thanksgiving.Martin Bernetti, AFP Via Getty ImagesThe worst times to travel by car over Thanksgiving are Tuesday, Nov. 26, 2024, and Wednesday, Nov. 27, 2024, in the afternoon.John Tlumacki, The Boston Globe Via Getty ImagesThe best time to drive to your destination for Thanksgiving is Thanksgiving Day itself.Jason Connolly, AFP Via Getty ImagesIf returning home from your Thanksgiving travel on Sunday, Dec. 1, drivers should leave in the morning. If returning home on Monday, Dec. 2, drivers should expect a mix of travelers and work commuters on the road between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m.Justin Sullivan, Getty ImagesAnd when it comes to the turkey, farmers raised 205 million turkeys in 2024, which is 6% less than last year, according to the USDA’s Turkeys Raised report.Lauren Witte, Clarion Ledger Via USA TODAY Network

Cuba: Tourism First, Housing Recovery Later

Photos: El Toque

By El Toque

HAVANA TIMES – The Cuban government has acknowledged that it will only be able to address 50% of the damage to roofs of homes caused by hurricanes Oscar and Rafael, as well as the earthquakes on November 10, 2024.

During a meeting on November 17, the Minister of Economy and Planning, Joaquin Alonso Vasquez, reminded that, in addition to the damages caused by these natural disasters, there are still cases of people affected by weather events in Pinar del Río (Hurricane Ian in 2022) and Guantánamo (Hurricane Matthew in 2017).

In contrast to the limited resources allocated to the repair of damaged homes, the tourism sector is recovering quickly, with the goal of being ready in the first days of December to receive tourists for the high season of 2024-2025.

This was confirmed by Juan Carlos García, the minister in charge of the Tourism who assured Granma newspaper that “the country and the Cuban economy” need the vitality of the hotel industry. Although he acknowledged that they will not meet the target of 3 million visitors in 2024, they are focusing their efforts and resources on improving services for tourists.

Fewer Tourists, More Hotel Investment

Although tourism in Cuba is practically the only one in the region that has not recovered since the 2019 pandemic, the government prioritizes what it calls “the engine of the economy.”

Despite the low occupancy rate – 28.4% in the first half of 2024 – resources have not been allocated to the recovery of other important sectors, such as agriculture or energy, nor to public services like health and education, despite daily reports of poor conditions in schools and hospitals.

Economist Pedro Monreal reported that “from 2020 to June 2024, investment primarily associated with tourism (the sum of ‘hotels and restaurants’ and ‘business services and real estate activity’) averaged 38.9% of the country’s total investment, compared to 9.4% for investment in electricity, gas, and water.”

The Canadian tour operator agency Sunwing, one of the largest sources of vacationers to Cuba, eliminated 26 hotels from its offerings on the island due to quality issues.

Samantha Taylor, the head of marketing, told Pax News that the hotels did not meet the expectations of what guests truly wanted to experience and acknowledged that prices had risen while quality had declined.

Regarding the loss of trust among Canadians in Cuban tourism, she mentioned that they had received cancellations and complaints from clients because the infrastructure did not meet expectations.

“What does a five-star hotel in Cuba mean? What’s to expect at a three-star hotel? What we see in our customers’ comments is that Canadians want transparency in what they are receiving. They don’t want surprises,” said Taylor.

Quality Issues Known to Cuban Authorities

Problems related to the quality of offerings are well known to Cuban authorities. Tourism minister Garcia stated that, to improve the conditions and services, “they created wholesale tourism provider companies, some of them with 100% foreign capital.”

Still, clients maintain questions regarding the quality of state-run tourist services, and some agencies suggest booking tours and trips through private businesses, which also guarantee electricity with generators and honestly explain to tourists what to expect from their trip and what they need to bring.

According to Travel Weekly, several agencies acknowledged that cancellations remain minimal but qualify the current moment as one of the worst for tourism on the island.

Recently, the Minister of Tourism  Juan Carlos Garcia told the Tass news agency that soon there will be hotels on the island built and managed by Russian companies, or others that will be managed by Russian entrepreneurs. Currently, there are 18 foreign hotel chains managing properties in Cuba.

It seems logical that the Cuban government would focus on Russian tourists (the second-largest source of visitors in 2024) when countries like Canada, France, or the UK advise their nationals not to visit the island due to power outages.

The promise of the marketing director of the Ministry of Tourism, Giana Galindo Henríquez, to guarantee backup generators for hotels is not enough. She told Tass that the impact of the nationwide blackout on October 18, 2024, was minimal in the sector, but it led to tourists being relocated to hotels with electricity service.

The Spanish  tourism-focused media outlet Preferente published that “tour operators, grouped in Seto, an industry  organization, have shown their absolute concern because telephone communications and the Internet network are very unstable.”

The report acknowledged that, despite government efforts, the recovery of normalcy in Cuba is no longer in the hands of the government.

One month after the first total blackout, Lessner Gomez, director of the Cuban Tourism Office in Toronto, assured that 100% of the hotel  facilities in Cuba had electricity.

Another point contrasting this information is that hospitals have suffered critical moments due to issues with their energy generators during extended power outages.

Homes vs. Hotels

According to preliminary data, more than 46,000 homes were affected by hurricanes Oscar (late October) and Rafael (early November), as well as the earthquakes on November 10, 2024. The majority of the damage was to the roofs of homes, and nearly 18% were total collapses.

While many of the affected people are currently living in tents donated by international organizations, the Cuban government is focusing on its 80,000 hotel rooms.

On several occasions, social media users have asked the government to use hotel facilities for the evacuation of people at risk due to natural disasters.

However, evacuations to the homes of friends and family are becoming more common. During Hurricane Oscar, for example, more than 70% of evacuations were carried out in the homes of acquaintances.

With blackouts lasting 12 hours or more across the country, homes with collapsed roofs, people who have lost almost everything due to natural disasters, and a population that takes to the streets every day to find food, the government is focused on attracting tourists and offering them new experiences.

The image in the cities is repeated: dark and impoverished streets, lit only by luxurious hotels that most Cubans cannot access.

First published in Spanish by El Toque and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.

Read more from Cuba here on Havana Times.

The new Bonhoeffer movie isn t just bad It s dangerous

Buried in the foreword to Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership,” the not-quite-disavowed blueprint for the incoming Trump administration, is a strange reference to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. “Open-borders activism,” the document declares, is “a classic example of what the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called ‘cheap grace.’” Bonhoeffer is then invoked to denounce other excesses of the left, such as environmental extremism and insufficient hostility to China.
It is obscene that an antifascist martyr’s memory is being used to legitimize a movement promising mass deportations, but the American right has long admired Bonhoeffer. Much of this admiration stems less from his theology than from his decision to join a conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler—a decision that ultimately led to his execution in the Flossenbürg concentration camp. This has given rise to the dubious concept of the “Bonhoeffer moment,” a term some use to describe a historical situation in which nonviolence is no longer tenable for a Christian and something like his act of attempted tyrannicide becomes necessary. Bonhoeffer moments are imagined as moments of extraordinary moral clarity, when good and evil are laid bare and previously unjustifiable acts become justified.
It is this image of Bonhoeffer wielding righteous violence against a tyrannical state that has ignited the right’s imagination. In 2011, former VeggieTales writer and current far-right radio host Eric Metaxas’s Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy became a runaway hit and positioned him as a popular interpreter of Bonhoeffer’s legacy (see “Hijacking Bonhoeffer,” October 19, 2010). In 2020, he proclaimed that the allegedly stolen election marked a Bonhoeffer moment and that lethal force was now permissible to keep Donald Trump in power: “What’s right is right,” he said. “We need to fight to the death, to the last blood.”
But Bonhoeffer himself refused to see the plot to assassinate Hitler as morally justified. He insisted that what he was doing, while necessary, was at the same time a grave moral wrong for which he must repent and beg God’s forgiveness. In the hundreds of pages he wrote during his years in the conspiracy, Bonhoeffer adamantly warned that any sense of moral clarity we might feel is always an illusion. If we trick ourselves into thinking that we have full knowledge of good and evil, that we clearly see right and wrong, then we never have to question the moral purity of our actions. Because we are on the side of good against evil, we think that our actions—and our violence—must therefore be good.
This was the heart of Bonhoeffer’s theological critique of fascism: fascism seduces by promising knowledge of good and evil, shrouding its own violence in a fantasy of moral clarity. His greatest act of antifascist resistance is thus not some act of righteous violence but his own steadfast refusal to see even the most necessary and seemingly justifiable violence as a positive moral good.
The new movie Bonhoeffer adapts Metaxas’s biography for the big screen. It situates Bonhoeffer’s story in the familiar genre of the World War II thriller but erases the moral powerlessness and inescapable guilt that haunted him.
The real Bonhoeffer wrote that he felt lost in a “huge masquerade of evil” in which “evil appears in the form of light.” He lamented the uselessness of Christian ethics, which relies on “the abstract notion of an isolated individual who, wielding an absolute criterion of what is good in and of itself, chooses continually and exclusively between this clearly recognized good and an evil recognized with equal clarity.”
Bonhoeffer the movie, on the other hand, presents him as just this kind of moral agent who clearly recognizes good and evil, with the only real question being whether he has the stomach to do what he knows is right. By reducing moral deliberation to a question of will, the movie not only badly misreads Bonhoeffer. It also traffics in the dangerous idea of the Bonhoeffer moment, inviting its viewers to imagine that they, too, can clearly recognize evil tyrants in need of some justified violence.
Nearly every scene mangles and stretches both Bonhoeffer’s life and German history into a pat fable of good versus evil. The real Bonhoeffer’s bit part in the conspiracy to kill Hitler (using his church contacts in England to pass documents negotiating a possible peace treaty in the event the coup was successful, all of which were ignored) is transformed into a starring role, with Movie Bonhoeffer hunched over a table in the back of a bar, whispering about plans to construct a bomb. The real Bonhoeffer’s failure to radicalize German churches against Nazi antisemitism (a failure that informed his understanding of Christian ethics as a dead end) is in the movie a rousing success—the Confessing Church forms as an underground cell of Christian resistance under Bonhoeffer’s command, with one character gushing that “Bonhoeffer and his merry men” have “declared war on Hitler.”
The most egregious misreading of the real Bonhoeffer comes in a scene where he makes the fateful decision to join the conspiracy. His brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi, has just told Bonhoeffer and his student Eberhard Bethge of the secret plan to kill Hitler. Bethge is shocked at the idea of committing murder and tries to talk Bonhoeffer out of it. He reminds Bonhoeffer that he once said Christians must defeat their enemies with the power of love. “That was before Hitler,” Bonhoeffer glowers. Bethge, despondent, asks, “Will God forgive us if we do this?” Bonhoeffer shouts him down: “Will he forgive us if we don’t?!”

The line gets Bonhoeffer’s thinking about the conspiracy exactly backwards. He was tortured by his decision to violate God’s clear and inviolable commandment not to kill. Everyone, without exception, is beloved of God, and killing is, in every situation, wrong. At the same time, it would be wrong to sit idly by as millions were murdered. No matter what he chose, whether he joined the conspiracy or not, he would be guilty. He had to act, he wrote, “in the sphere of relativity, completely shrouded in the twilight that the historical situation casts upon good and evil.” He joined the plot, but he refused to see his decision as morally justifiable. “Here the law is being broken, violated,” he deplored. It might be true that “the commandment is broken out of dire necessity,” but to say he broke the commandment of necessity is still to say he broke the commandment. Rather than pretend this was some positive moral good, Bonhoeffer instead threw himself at God’s feet and begged forgiveness for the sin he could not but commit. The movie has none of this squishy moral agony.
Bonhoeffer is clearly aware of the real Bonhoeffer’s writings on the impossibility of right moral action, but in the film any language of moral ambiguity is simply window dressing on a clear-cut case of good versus evil. Whenever Bonhoeffer does acknowledge the moral messiness of his actions, it’s always in tough-guy quips delivered like Clint Eastwood. When Dohnanyi tells him that the conspiracy will involve getting his hands dirty, Bonhoeffer snaps, “All I have are dirty hands.” And when he’s told he’ll have to swear an oath to Hitler so he can join the Abwehr and travel freely to England, he growls, “Sometimes you have to lie better than the Father of Lies.” Gone is the twilight of good and evil, gone is the diabolical masquerade in which evil appears as light.
This Bonhoeffer is exactly the kind of person the real Bonhoeffer skewered as an “ethical fanatic” who easily falls prey to fascism’s seductions. Ethical fanatics “believe they can face the power of evil with the purity of their will and their principles” but only end up “fall[ing] into the net of their more clever opponent” as their self-conception of being morally pure makes them blind to their own complicity.
I can’t help mentioning that Bonhoeffer not only is based on a far-right propagandist’s spurious biography but is produced by Angel Studios, which produced the QAnon-adjacent thriller Sound of Freedom in 2023. That film dramatizes the life of Tim Ballard, a self-styled crusader against child sex trafficking, whose bizarre claims that he led secret raids into African “baby factories” where children are harvested for Satanic rituals landed him on the first Trump administration’s anti-trafficking advisory board. (Ballard was removed from his organization after being accused by several women of sexual misconduct.) Ballard is played by Jim Caviezel, best known as Jesus in The Passion of the Christ and last seen at a Michael Flynn event at which the general endorsed the idea of a military dictatorship and Caviezel accused Hillary Clinton of consuming adrenochrome harvested from the blood of children.
Sound of Freedom and Bonhoeffer inhabit the same political and moral universe, in which the only moral dilemma is whether the good guys can set aside their squeamishness and start killing the bad guys. For the real Bonhoeffer, this was exactly the fantasy of moral purity that led so many into complicity with fascism’s escalating spiral of violence.
The final scene in Bonhoeffer, based on historically discredited accounts of the man’s death, explicitly invokes the idea of moral purity and extends it vicariously to the viewer. Bonhoeffer stoically marches to the gallows past his fellow prisoners (and the SS man whose heart, Grinch-like, grew three sizes after meeting the saintly pastor). He stands with the noose around his neck and recites the Beatitudes. When he gets to “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God,” the camera cuts to the dappled sunlight shining through the clouds. As in every other scene, this is all text and no subtext: Bonhoeffer is pure of heart, and he has seen God.
But the real Bonhoeffer did not feel himself pure at heart. He felt himself an attempted murderer, wracked by shame and guilt, a moral failure whose only hope was in God’s boundless forgiveness. That his fellow conspirators saw themselves as heroes profoundly disturbed him. “We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds,” he wrote in a document circulated among the conspiracy. “Experience has rendered us suspicious of human beings, and often we have failed to speak to them a true and open word. Unbearable conflicts have worn us down or even made us cynical. Are we still of any use?” The film whitewashes the real Bonhoeffer’s crushing sense of uselessness, offering instead a Bonhoeffer who promises that violence can make us pure.
Project 2025’s invocation of Bonhoeffer to justify a regime of deportation and concentration camps is obviously absurd, but it illustrates the danger of remembering Bonhoeffer more for his decision to kill than for his insistence that no killing, even if absolutely necessary, can ever be justified. A truer way to think of a “Bonhoeffer moment,” instead of a moment when good and evil are laid bare and violence becomes permissible, would be a moment when we are so implicated in structures of evil and violence that right moral action becomes impossible and we cannot but choose wrongly.
In other words, every moment is this kind of Bonhoeffer moment.

‘Living Dead Girl’ latest book banned from Utah public schools

Library at Tooele High School on Monday, March 20, 2023. Another book, “Living Dead Girl,” reaches “banned status” in Utah.
(Scott G Winterton, Deseret News)
(Scott G Winterton, Deseret News)

SALT LAKE CITY — There are now 14 books banned from schools across the state. The latest book, “Living Dead Girl” by Elizabeth Scott, was added earlier this month.
The fictional book published in 2009 is about a 15-year-old who was abducted and abused.
Related: More books banned from schools across Utah
Under the state’s new sensitive materials law adopted in July, the book was banned after three Utah school districts removed it. The book was available for students in grades seven through 11 before it was removed in Davis, Tooele, and Washington School Districts.
The Utah State Board of Education bans books in schools statewide when they are removed from at least 3 school districts or 2 districts and 5 charter schools.
Related:  Utah book challenges by the numbers: A KSL investigation
The list of the 13 other banned books was released in August. That list included titles like “The Forever” by Judy Bloom. The “A Court of Thorns and Roses” series by Sarah J. Mass is also on the list. The Scott book is the first book added to the list since August.
KSL NewsRadio has reached out to Simon and Schuster. We are seeking comment from the author after officials removed “Living Dead Girl” from Utah classrooms.
 

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Dutch publisher owned by Simon & Schuster to trial using AI for English-language translations

Artificial intelligence © Shutterstock The largest book publisher in The Netherlands has confirmed it plans to use artificial intelligence (AI) to translate some of its books into English, The Bookseller can exclusively reveal. 
Utrecht-headquartered publisher Veen Bosch & Keuning (VBK) was acquired by Simon & Schuster earlier this year. It was Simon & Schuster’s first acquisition of a non-English-language publisher, which it said at the time would help it access “broader European markets”. 
A spokesperson for VBK told The Bookseller: “We are working on a limited experiment with some Dutch authors, for their books to be translated into English language using AI. There will be one editing phase, and authors have been asked to give permission for this.  
“We are not creating books with AI, it all starts and ends with human action. The translations are not yet launched.” 
The Bookseller understands that a limited number of books are being translated and only in cases where the English rights have not been sold. 
Ian Giles, chair of the Translators Association at the Society of Authors (SoA), said: “This is concerning news. Earlier this year, the SoA found that one third of literary translators are already losing work to AI. Where work itself is not lost, translators struggle to increase their prices in the face of the AI challenger. This pressure on translators’ incomes jeopardises our ability to support ourselves in what is a highly precarious industry.” 
He added: “If authors wouldn’t let AI write their own work, do they wish it to be translated by AI? AI models are pattern-spotting machines, converting inputs to and outputs from numbers, and prioritising fluency over all else in the end product. If this publisher feels the need to consult human translators or editors to adjust the output, they are recognising the flaws in this approach. A low-quality translation, even following post-editing, will misrepresent or at worst negatively affect the author’s original work unbeknownst to them.” 
Lisa Fransson, a Swedish-to-English translator and author of The Shape of Guilt (Epoque Press), wrote in a comment piece for The Bookseller: “As a translator I’m deeply concerned about the rise of AI, and particularly in terms of using it to translate literature, and as an author I know that I weigh every word… A book, any book, is a work of art. So why would you even consider running it through a machine?” 
She said that among technical translators, where AI has already made huge advances, prices have been “driven down” and focus shifted “from translation to machine translation post-editing”.
“[Technical translators have] already left the profession in droves, to do literally anything else,” she said. “Although AI hasn’t quite caught up with literary translation yet, the knowledge that it’s there is making it harder for translators to charge their going rate.” 
Simon & Schuster was bought by the private equity firm KKR in August 2023. At the time, KKR said it intended to support the publisher’s growth into international markets.  
The Bookseller contacted Simon & Schuster to ask if VBK’s AI translation trial had any wider implications for its parent business or if it planned to expand further into Europe. Simon & Schuster declined to comment. 

Translators voice concern over S&S-owned publisher’s ‘disastrous decision’ to translate books using AI

Translators have raised concerns over Simon & Schuster-owned publisher Veen Bosch & Keuning’s (VBK) “disastrous decision” to use artificial intelligence (AI) to translate some titles into English. 
The Bookseller revealed last week that the Utrecht-headquartered publisher is “working on a limited experiment with some Dutch authors for their books to be translated into English language using AI”. It was later reported in the Guardian that the “project contains less than 10 titles—all commercial fiction”, and does not include any literary books or titles to which English rights would likely be sold at any point. The story was also followed up on Radio 4’s “Today” programme.
The publisher, which was acquired by Simon & Schuster (S&S) earlier this year, explained that this would include “one editing phase, and [that] authors have been asked to give permission for this”. 
Although the Dutch publisher is owned by S&S, The Bookseller understands that the two publishers’ editorial decisions remain separate.
Industry figures have voiced their concerns about the potential “reputational damage” of this move, and the inefficiency that AI could introduce into the translation process. 
Louise Rogers Lalaurie, who has translated 15 novels from French and is the author of Matisse: The Books (Thames & Hudson/University of Chicago Press), explained that the “end result” of an AI-generated translation can cost “more than a good human translation first time round” due to the time-consuming “post-editing” process.
Editing texts after they have been translated using AI requires reviewing the translations “line by line”, and writing notes for the author to check. “Any translator worth their salt will charge for this by the hour,” Lalaurie said, explaining that this process can end up being more expensive for the publisher.
“The only time I’ve done a post-edit was for a valued art-world client who had outsourced a non-fiction work to a non-UK publisher,” she added. “The unpublishable / frequently incomprehensible AI translation added about three weeks and at least a couple of thousand euros to the process and cost. S&S should also have estimated the cost to them of the reputational damage their disastrous decision will surely wreak.”
Meanwhile, Jane Davis, a literary and commercial translator from Swedish, Norwegian and French into UK English, said that translators don’t “just translate the words” or “even just translate the meaning”. From fact-checking to ensuring that phrases are not taken out of context and the humour of the writing is preserved, she explained that a translator works to “generally make the author look even better in translation than in the original”.
AI translations post-edited by humans would have a noticeable impact on the quality of the book for readers, Davis argued. “On the few occasions I’ve agreed to do post-editing, I’ve been paid maybe a quarter of my translation rate for something that, theoretically, requires […] ‘extra tasks’” she added. “But I wasn’t being paid to translate. I was being paid to tidy up the text.”
Literary agent Barbara J Zitwer said that her agency will not sell books to any publisher “who uses AI to translate books into English”. She added: “This is a terrible idea—the AI translations are dreadful and it will destroy translators’ jobs and essential roles in the global publishing world.”
S&S declined to comment for this piece.