Good morning. It is May 10th. It is raining in New York City. And this is your Indignity Morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. The dominant story in this morning's New York Times is RAFA and what Israeli military may or may not do to it. The lead spot on page one is about the back and forth between the administrations of Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu about the United States withholding weapons from Israel in an attempt to prevent an all -out assault on the city packed with more than a million Palestinians, most of them displaced from the other parts of Gaza previously leveled by the Israeli military. Inside the paper, there's a bit more context about what they're arguing over and what they're not arguing over. For instance, on page A7, the headline is, hospitals in Ra 'afa are running out of fuel.

The World Health Organization announced that there are only three days' worth of fuel for the hospitals in the city. The Times writes, no aid trucks have entered Gaza since Sunday through the two main border crossings, the United Nations said on Wednesday in its own warning about the dire implications of Israel seizing the Ra 'afah crossing with Egypt on Tuesday and closing the Karim Shalom crossing between Gaza and southern Israel over the weekend. Already, the Times writes, the Abu Yusuf al -Najjar Hospital, one of three major hospitals in Rafa that has been partially functioning before the Israeli military operation this week has shut down and emptied out. All humanitarian operations across the Gaza Strip are at imminent risk of collapse. The story continues because of the lack of fuel, international aid groups said at a joint news conference on Wednesday. Turning the page, there is a huge satellite photograph to illustrate the headline view from above, much of Refuge City has already flattened. Because the assault on Rafa that everyone is trying to stop is the ground invasion, not the ongoing bombardment of the city. And then on the next page after that, Israel smashing into Rafa will not snuff out Hamas, Biden aid says. That's John F. Kirby, a White House national security spokesperson, speaking on behalf of Joe Biden himself after seven months of indiscriminate total warfare against population centers and the slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians. The White House has noticed that Israel doesn't seem to be achieving any of its stated war aims and is now saying that more of the same will not get to that sustainable and enduring defeat of Hamas. 

On the left -hand side of page one, The Times gives full effort and attention for bylands worth to covering news that The Washington Post broke yesterday. Trump solicits billion dollars at oil dinner, vows to upend Biden's environmental rules. Former president Donald J. Trump told a group of oil executives and lobbyists gathered at a dinner at his Mar -a -Lago resort last month that they should donate $1 billion to his presidential campaign because if elected, he would roll back environmental rules that he said hampered their industry, according to two people who were there. The Times executive editor, Joe Kahn, said a lot of really mortifyingly wrongheaded things to semaphores Ben Smith in a recent interview, making it sound like the paper had learned absolutely nothing from the ways that it fumbled the 2016 race. So it's extremely good to see this story, one which deals with the grim substance of what Donald Trump is offering on the campaign trail and would presumably do if re -elected, and contrasts it with the substantive policy accomplishments of the Biden administration on energy and the environment rather than holding forth on how the perceptions of the remarks might shape voters' enthusiasm and create an impression of which candidate is faring better. It's just straight up substantive coverage of what the two candidates would or wouldn't do with the power that they are hoping to get from the voters in November. It also has a very nice clear third paragraph credit to the Washington Post. It's all much, much better than the paper's 2016 performance in solemnly refusing to follow up on the corruption of the Trump Foundation, preferring to keep its reporters digging for non -existent infractions at the Clinton Foundation, rather than following, amplifying, and elaborating on what should have been an all -consuming scandal. 

And in between the RAFA coverage and the petroleum pay -for -play coverage, there's another nice clean news lead. Even as it has become increasingly clear that the bird flu outbreak on the nation's dairy farms began months earlier and is probably much more widespread than previously thought, federal authorities have emphasized that the virus poses little risk to humans. Yet there's a group of people who are at high risk for infection, the estimated 100 ,000 men and women who work on those farms. There has been no widespread testing to see how many may be infected. None have been vaccinated against bird flu. Between the built -in regulatory shortcomings of the CDC and the Department of Agriculture, and our long -established culture of maximum neglect and exploitation of agricultural workers. It's hard to say who would even be trying to do anything about the problem. And on page A -12, in a side column on the front of the national report, the Devil's Hole pupfish are thriving. There are now 191 of them living on their rock ledge, partway down their flooded cave of unknown depth in Death Valley, up from a mere 35 pupfish in 2013.

Congratulations to the Devil's Hole Pupfish. That is the news. Thank you for listening. Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. And if all goes well, we will talk again on Monday.