Israel Expands Military Operation, SCOTUS Hears Purdue Pharma Case, Liz Cheney

So what does this mean for the civilians in Gaza?

Today the Supreme Court hears arguments for and against a bankruptcy settlement.

It involves Purdue Pharma, maker of the pain medication OxyContin.

Can members of the Sackler family limit their liability?

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and is now targeting Hamas strongholds all across the Gaza Strip.

And that is the hard part.

Many civilians have already moved from northern Gaza to the south

and may now face demands to leave the same areas to which they fled.

Eleanor, hello.

Would you just start by telling us more about Israel's stepped-up operations?

Well, Israel says it's hit hundreds of Hamas targets overnight

as its forces pushed deeper into Gaza.

And there were multiple strikes in and around the southern Gaza city of Hanounis

where the top Hamas leadership is believed to be located,

including Yahya Sinwar, who orchestrated the October 7th attack.

Israeli media is reporting that any fighting in Hanounis will be complicated

not only by the hundreds of thousands of people who have fled from the north,

but also by the fact that some of the Israeli hostages

are believed to be held somewhere around the city.

Here's Israeli military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari.

Yeah, so he says the Israeli forces are fighting Hamas terrorists face to face

wherever they are and killing them.

The Israeli military said that it has found 800 Hamas tunnels since the beginning of the war,

and it claims to have destroyed 500 of them.

that it is targeting to leave, but how and where are they supposed to go?

We're already hearing that this latest evacuation warning is causing a lot of confusion and anger.

I mean, the Israeli army is claiming to have published a very detailed digital map online

to help people get to safer places.

And they've also dropped leaflets.

You know, they're urging people to go east or west toward the sea,

but you can't go any farther south, so it's difficult.

NPR's producer in Gaza, Anas Baba, spoke with Gazans yesterday.

Here's Bassel Bassouni. He's an engineer and a father.

He's putting up a tent for his family in Rafah. He's just fled Hanounis.

He says there are no words to describe the horrible conditions and what's happening.

He says there are more than 100 families here,

and the last two nights were the most terrible in my life, he told NPR.

Bassouni says he and his five children watched as the sky was lit up with bombing.

What are you hearing Israelis saying about this renewed fighting?

but here in Tel Aviv the prevailing sentiment seems to be that getting the hostages out

is more important than the war, and it should come first.

I was at a massive rally in Tel Aviv over the weekend for the more than 100 hostages still in Gaza.

Hadass Calderon spoke.

Her two children, ages 12 and 16, were kidnapped from a kibbutz and just released.

Here she is.

Mom, you're alive, is the first thing my kid said to me, she tells the crowd.

And her kids thought she'd been killed when they were separated in the October 7th Hamas attack.

And Calderon told the crowd, we can't leave the hostages there in the dark and helpless.

What are people saying there?

I spoke with 70-year-old Ahmad Omar, a jeweler in Ramallah.

He described how people feel.

You know, it's affecting everybody because they're Palestinians, you know, the same people.

We see little kids.

And Israeli human rights groups say that 250 Palestinians have been killed since then.

One told me it was a pressure cooker ready to explode.

Eleanor, thank you.

that was meant to compensate victims of the addictive painkiller OxyContin.

Nina, good morning.

a bill called the Affordable Care Act.

without telling people what they were doing.

That's documented in court and in a documentary called Crime of the Century.

They were drug dealers wearing suits and lab coats.

and the company agreed that it owed $8 billion in criminal and civil fines,

most of which were to be paid to state and local governments

handling the fallout from the opioid crisis.

And most of that money was conditioned on the company

reaching a deal in bankruptcy court that would reimburse the victims.

Is a challenge to that arrangement what the Supreme Court is now considering?

The question at the center of the case is whether the bankruptcy court

has the authority to release the Sacklers from liability,

despite the fact that all three of the original Sackler brothers

who bought Purdue and ultimately developed OxyContin were doctors,

and that six Sacklers sat on the board of the company,

including the board chair Richard Sackler,

who closely directed the firm's aggressive and deceptive

OxyContin marketing strategy.

but don't courts have a lot of power in these cases?

a whole category of guilty players is one that's not been decided

by the Supreme Court.

In this case, the Sacklers at first offered $4 billion for the settlement,

then moved it up to $6 billion.

But the Justice Department trustee who oversees bankruptcy cases

in New York, Connecticut, and Vermont still objected to the deal.

And defending that position today, the Biden administration will argue

that the bankruptcy law does not authorize bankruptcy courts

to approve or release from liability for third parties like the Sacklers

who have not declared bankruptcy and still have at least half their wealth

and probably more if the deal is approved.

shouldn't get away with whatever they still are getting away with.

What are the basing arguments on each side?

getting the rewards of a bankruptcy at half price,

but they're still able to keep more than half of their money and assets,

and they can't be sued personally, so they'll never have to testify

about their misdeeds.

Georgetown Law professor Adam Levitin puts it this way.

They come clean about their assets, and they give up all of their assets

to their creditors.

And the Sacklers are not doing either of those things.

but it's the only way to get all the players and the victims in one tent

and provide some real compensation.

And if the Supreme Court vetoes the bankruptcy, there's no guarantee

that victims will actually be compensated because the Sacklers have hidden

their wealth in foreign banks that are very difficult to access.

And at best, getting to that money would take years and potentially burn

millions if not billions of dollars in legal fees.

about former President Donald Trump.

in this country if Trump is elected again.

Cheney used to be the number three House Republican, a post she lost

when she turned against Trump for his effort to stay in office

after he lost the presidential election in 2020.

which comes out tomorrow, and Leila is with us now to give us a preview.

Good morning.

What was your biggest takeaway?

to make sure Trump is not reelected.

Let's listen to some of our conversation.

Are you considering a run for the presidency in 2024?

I look at it, though, very much through the lens of stopping Donald Trump.

And so whatever it will take to do that is very much my focus.

I think the danger is that great that that needs to be everybody's top priority.

She says, as Steve said, democracy in this country is at stake

if Trump is elected again.

And her book, Oath and Honor, is an accounting of what happened

inside her party in the weeks before and after the January 6th attack

on the Capitol by supporters of the former president.

And, Michelle, she does not hold back, calling her former colleagues

collaborators and enablers who knowingly went along with a lie

that the election was stolen in 2020 and a lie that led to the attack

on the Capitol.

And she writes in her book that Trump is the most dangerous man ever

to inhabit the Oval Office.

I mean, you said that she doesn't hold back there.

What about the Republican Party writ large, the party itself?

But she told me the Republican Party in its current form is not her party.

She calls it an anti-constitutional party.

And I asked her what she thought when she saw six out of eight

Republican White House hopefuls in a debate raise their hands

when asked if they'd support Trump as the Republican nominee

if he were convicted of a crime.

And here's what she said.

certainly the party itself will have lost any claim to be a party

that is, in fact, supportive of the Constitution.

which investigated the attack on the Capitol.

Does she think her work with that committee accomplished what it needed to?

It's why she wrote this book, she says, in which she calls out

the Republican Party leadership for being cowards,

who went along with Trump and risked the country's institutions,

is what she wrote.

And the danger, she says, is not in the rearview mirror.

where they suggested that even if Donald Trump were elected,

it wouldn't be that bad because, of course, we have these institutions

and we have these traditions and we have the separation of powers

and that people could somehow count on that to restrain him.

And one of the main messages of my book is, no, you can't.

You cannot count on those institutions to restrain him.

That's NPR's Layla Fowler.

Layla, thank you.

on Morning Edition and at NPR.org.

And that's Up First for Monday, December 4th.

I'm Michelle Martin.

Today's Up First was edited by Michael Sullivan,

Krishnadev Kalamur, Reena Advani, and H.J. Mai.

It was produced by Lily Quiroz, Mansi Khurana, and Lindsay Totte.

We get engineering support from Stacey Abbott,

and our technical director is Zach Coleman.

Join us tomorrow.

You can find more in-depth coverage of the stories we talked about today

and a lot more on NPR's Morning Edition.

That's the radio show that A. Martinez, Layla Fowler, Steve Inskeep, and I host.

Find Morning Edition on your local NPR station at stations.npr.org.