Up First from NPR - Gaza Hospital Evacuated, Argentina Elections, Road Runner's Revenge

Episode Date: November 18, 2023

Israeli troops are evacuating Al-Shifa Hospital now that it's under their control. A maverick politician could become Argentina's next president. Why would a movie studio decide against releasing a movie it's already finished?Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Al-Shaifa Hospital in Gaza City is being evacuated, patients and all. Israel's military took control of the giant medical complex this week. And says Hamas is operating in tunnels below the facility. I'm Aisha Roscoe. And I'm Scott Simon, and this is Up First from NPR News. Israel is also allowing small amounts of fuel into Gaza. One former negotiator says it could lead to Hamas releasing its hostages. This is kind of a first step, what the Americans are pushing the Israelis to do in order to build confidence with Hamas that a deal can be made.

And Israel will release prisoners. Voters in Argentina go to the polls for a presidential election runoff. And Warner Brothers' Roadrunner movie hits a brick wall. Ouch! Stay with us, we've got the news you need to start your weekend. Now Our Change will honour 100 years of the Royal Canadian Air Force and their dedicated service to communities at home and abroad. From the skies to Our Change, this $2 commemorative circulation coin marks their storied past and promising future. Find the limited edition Royal Canadian Air Force $2 coin today. Thousands of patients, doctors, and other Palestinians who sought safety there

now have to leave al-Shifa hospital. That's after they've been holed up there for weeks with dwindling supplies as gun battles rage outside. And Piers Lauren Frayer has been following this from Tel Aviv. Lauren, thanks for being with us. Thanks for having me, Scott. Please tell us about the evacuation. So Gaza health officials say patients and evacuees are leaving al-Shifa hospital, which has been a focal point of the war for weeks now. Israel says doctors invited them to evacuate people. Palestinian officials say they were ordered to. Telecom networks have come back up last night after Israel agreed to allow a very small amount of fuel to enter Gaza. And so NPR was able to reach someone inside a different hospital in northern Gaza. His name is Fadiyel Wehdi.

He's a freelance photographer. And a warning, you can hear the sound of explosions behind him as he spoke with NPR. He describes crowds of evacuees around him, all under heavy bombardment and artillery fire. He says apartment buildings have been burned there. It's in the north of Gaza. What about elsewhere? Yeah, so Gaza health officials say at least two dozen people were killed in an airstrike in an apartment building in southern Gaza, too. And it's worth noting that that's where Israel has been telling people to flee to. NPR analyzed health ministry death

tolls and mapped satellite data and found at least a third of deaths in Gaza are in an area that Israel had designated as safer for civilians. The Gaza health ministry's official death toll is about 11,500, but they haven't actually updated that in a few days, and they're struggling to count the dead themselves. Thousands of people are missing and may be under the rubble. And Scott, it's not just Gaza. Israel says it conducted an airstrike in the West Bank today, too, and Palestinian ambulance officials confirmed several people killed there. Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu told NPR's morning edition yesterday that he intends to destroy Hamas and free the Israeli hostages that Hamas took. Any indication Israeli troops are getting closer to finding those hostages?

Well, Israel says its troops have recovered the bodies of two of those hostages in recent days near al-Shifa hospital. You know, Netanyahu is under tremendous domestic pressure to find the other 238 hostages and bring them back alive. Polls show that Netanyahu is already low approval. Ratings have plummeted since the war began. Here's what it sounds like on the outskirts of Jerusalem today. Thousands of Israelis are marching into Jerusalem today, demanding that the government do more to get the hostages freed. And, you know, being in Israel for the past several weeks, you see banners all over the country that with the words, bring them home. Officials from Qatar reportedly have been acting as mediators.

Do we know anything about those talks? Yeah, I mean, obviously those negotiations are held with the utmost secrecy. But I spoke with a former Israeli hostage negotiator who's been in touch with both Hamas and Israeli officials. His name is Gershon Baskin. And he says Israel's willingness to allow fuel into Gaza, albeit in very small amounts in recent days, is significant. The entry of the fuel is actually part of the deal that's being negotiated. This is kind of a first step, what the Americans are pushing the Israelis to do in order to build confidence with Hamas that a deal can be made. And Israel will release prisoners. He says Israel will be looking at Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, likely starting with women and minors first, trying to figure out if there were any prisoner swap, who they could trade for these hostages in Gaza.

And Piers Lauren Frayer in Tel Aviv, thanks so much. Thank you, Scott. In Argentina, inflation is 140 percent. Yes, you heard that right, 140 percent. Which means prices more than double over the course of a year. One presidential hopeful says he's got a solution. Slash spending and abandon the Argentine peso for the U.S. dollar. His opponent is a member of the current ruling party who is advocating more gradual change. NPR South America correspondent Carrie Kahn joins us now from Buenos Aires.

Carrie, thanks for being with us. Good morning. Please tell us about the libertarian candidate. He's attracted a lot of attention. He's Javier Millet. He calls himself an anarcho-capitalist. He believes that markets should be unfettered, completely free of the state. And before getting into politics, only two years ago, he was this TV pundit known for outrageous and

expletive-laced tirades against the political elites here. He calls them the corrupt, thieving caste. His style draws many comparisons to Donald Trump and neighboring Brazil's former far-right leader, Jair Bolsonaro. Scott, he sports this mop of uncombed hair, long sideburns. He says he's a tantric sex expert. He has five dogs he cloned from a past pet. He denigrates the Pope, which doesn't go over well here. The Pope is, of course, Argentine. And Millet calls him a filthy leftist and says if he wins, Argentina will only have diplomatic relations with Israel and the U.S., no communists, and that includes China. Kind of an all-embracing agenda. Argentina's economy is in such dire straits. Does the current ruling party have much of a chance of winning? You'd think that would be impossible, given Argentina's nearly 150 percent inflation. Practically every day the peso here loses values.

And the candidate for the party in power is the current economy minister. He's Sergio Massa, he's 51, and he's a veteran politician with the Peronist party here, which is one of, if not the dominant political forces since democratic return. And to answer your question more precisely, yes, he can win. The Peronists have quite a vote generating machine, and it is in full gear, especially among its stronghold, the poor and the working class, who are quite accustomed to Argentina's vast subsidies, and that's subsidies on everything from education to public transportation to home energy costs. Carrie, is there something about Argentina that lends itself to an outsider coming so close to possibly and sometimes winning? Look, the two main political forces here have traded power for decades, and the economy remains dismal.

Forty percent of Argentines now live in poverty. And Ben Gaddan, who runs the Latin America program at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., he summed it up best for me. If you were in a science lab creating the perfect conditions for a populist radical outsider, you would create Argentina in 2023. And the situation is particularly bad for young social media plugged in Argentines who've just been shut out of any possible job market and stuck living at home with their parents. They are among Millet's most ardent supporters. What do you hear from voters? Voters are mad. They want

to punish the Peronists, all politicians. It's called the voto bronco, and that's the angry vote. But then you have voters egged on by Massa who are afraid of Millet's radical plans. All this cuts to Argentina's vast social safety net. And they are the voto de miedo, the fear vote. So you have a lot of people that are just now undecided. They say they're stuck with two bad choices. Listen to Sheila de la Fuente. She's a school teacher and mother of two. She says it just feels like we are on this tightrope, teetering, ready for this horrible fall when it comes to everything from education, crime, and the economy. So we just have to see who comes out more and votes tomorrow.

Is it the angry voter or is it the fearful voter? And polls are just too close to call now. And here's Kerry Khan in Buenos Aires. Thanks so much. You're welcome. Hollywood studio Warner Brothers spent $70 million to make a movie about Roadrunner's arch nemesis, Wile E. Coyote. Then it said it wouldn't release the film. Then it said it would at least let the creators find another outlet for it. Meep meep. Matt Bellany from Puck News joins us now to explain. Hi, Matt.

Hello. Okay, now, last week, the studio, Warner Brothers, backtracked and is now allowing filmmakers to shop Coyote vs. Acme to other distributors. But did the studio give an explanation for why they shelved the movie in the first place? This movie was greenlit with a $70 million budget, and it was supposed to be for their streaming service. The time between it was greenlit and now, there has been a regime change

at Warner Brothers, and the new regime has said that we're not going to make $70 million movies for the streaming service. We're going to put all of our movies in theaters. So then they said, okay, we'll put this movie in theaters. But then as they looked at it to people at the studio, it didn't feel theatrical enough for a $30 million marketing campaign that you have to give to make this movie a success. So they said, let's just not release it at all. We'll get some financial benefits from being able to apply the losses on our balance sheet. And that's where the creative community really responded negatively. So Matt, you were on NPR more than a year ago after Warner Brothers shelled Batgirl to talk about the strategy. And, you know, Hollywood has been under

a lot of pressure since then. I mean, you know, with the writers and actor strike, how are studios looking at making these financial calculations now? The economics of the studio business have gotten worse. The ad market has turned, which has put pressure on these studios to cut costs. There's been layoffs. The stock prices of many of these media companies, other than Netflix, have gone down significantly, especially Warner Brothers Discovery, which has lost about half of its value since April of 2022. And that is all weighing on what the ultimate decision is here. Because if this were normal times, the studio probably would have said, you know, yeah, it's 70 million. It's

a little bit more than we would have spent on this movie. But you know what? We're in the business of taking risks on creators. We want our standing in the community to stay high. Let's just release the movie and see where it goes. These days, you don't get that luxury to make that decision. Congressman Joaquin Castro, a Democrat from Texas, called for a probe into the Warner Brothers strategy, comparing it to burning down a house for the insurance money. What do you make of that? I don't totally understand the criticism because obviously Warner Brothers paid for this movie.

They can do with it what they want. The talent involved in the film is getting paid. So I don't see the argument there. There was also an antitrust argument that was thrown around by the congressman. I don't really see that either because this isn't really anti-competitive. It's just one studio having financial problems deciding that they don't want to release a product.

But it seems wrong that these artists would put years of their lives into a movie that the studio would decide not to release for a small financial benefit. Matt Bellany is the host of the podcast, The Town, and a reporter with Puck News. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. And that's Up First for Saturday, November 18, 2023. I'm Scott Simon. And I'm Aisha Roscoe.

Andrew Craig, Danny Hensel, and Fernando Naro-Roman produced this Saturday version of Up First. Melissa Gray, Donald Clyde, Tara Neal, and Matthew Sherman edited. Our director is Michael Radcliffe with engineering support from Anna Glovna. Evie Stone is our senior supervising editor. Sarah Oliver is our executive producer. And Jim Kane is our deputy managing editor. And thanks to all those fine folks who also lend their talents to Weekend Edition as well. Up First is back tomorrow with a story of why so many coal miners killed in a West Virginia explosion were suffering from black lung disease.

And there's more news, interviews, books, music, just plain fun this weekend on the radio. Weekend Edition airs every Saturday and Sunday morning. You can find your NPR station at stations.npr.org.