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USA Letter | October 2 — Gaza Healthcare Letters

Letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris Download PDF Download Appendix OPEN LETTER FROM AMERICAN MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS WHO SERVED IN GAZAThe Honorable Joseph R. BidenPresident of the United StatesThe White HouseWashington, DCUnited States of AmericaThe Honorable Kamala D. HarrisVice Pres...

Click to view the original at gazahealthcareletters.org

Hasnain says:

This is just.. I don’t have words left tonight. Will just go and hug my kid.

“Gaza was the first time I held a baby’s brains in my hand. The first of many.
- Dr. Mark Perlmutter, orthopedic and hand surgeon

Children are universally considered innocents in armed conflict. However, every single signatory to this letter saw children in Gaza who suffered violence that must have been deliberately directed at them. Specifically, every one of us who worked in an emergency, intensive care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head or chest on a regular or even a daily basis. It is impossible that such widespread shooting of young children throughout Gaza, sustained over the course of an entire year is accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civilian and military authorities.”

Posted on 2024-10-05T04:50:25+0000

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The Appalling Attack on Ta-Nehisi Coates Is a Massive Media Failing

It is not antisemitic to defend Palestinian human rights. And it’s past time for more American Jews to say so to correct a media that’s lost the thread.

Click to view the original at newrepublic.com

Hasnain says:

“I am not afraid of Ta-Nahisi Coates chronicling Palestinian life. I am not afraid of Rashida Tlaib asserting that the state should not be prosecuting protesters. I am not afraid of the discomfort that will inevitably come when we allow Palestinians to be seen and grapple with our complicity in dehumanizing them. Instead, I am afraid that those who have championed Israel at all costs will soon get to live at home in the kind of theocracy they covet abroad.

For the high holidays this year, I am choosing the radical good deed of saying so out loud, despite how much more isolated that might make me within my own faith community. One should not have to be Jewish to call out wrongs in plain sight, whether they happen on the relatively comfortable couches of morning television or in the streets of Gaza, without fear of widespread retribution. But in this media and political landscape, it is incumbent on Jewish Americans who see these wrongs to use their voices and create the permission structure for legitimate criticism and debate.”

Posted on 2024-10-05T04:42:32+0000

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Iran launches missiles toward Israel: Live updates | CNN

Missiles have been launched from Iran to Israel, according to a statement from the Israel Defense Forces.. Follow for live news updates.

Click to view the original at cnn.com

Hasnain says:

I am hoping this does not turn into WW3. As others put it more eloquently on twitter, this was the most preventable war of all time.

Posted on 2024-10-01T17:49:15+0000

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Ta-Nehisi Coates on the power of stories, new book, "The Message"

Acclaimed author Ta-Nehisi Coates joins "CBS Mornings" to talk about his new book, "The Message," and about the banning of his work in South Carolina.

Click to view the original at cbsnews.com

Hasnain says:

This is one of the most disgraceful interviews I’ve seen recently, and I’ve seen a lot of them. I am still incredulous at the display of racism here. I know people harp on and on about media being biased (from both sides!) but it’s been interesting seeing how media is portrayed in the states. Growing up, we treated media as biased always, and we tried to correct for it. But in the US people tend to ignore that for some reason. It’s often hidden (or agrees with our biases so we ignore it). But.. it’s there. And we should call it out for what it is.

TNC has the patience of a saint.

Quoting someone on Twitter:

“Among the many reasons that this segment will likely live in infamy as a clear example of open Islamophobic racism and journalistic malpractice from @CBSNews:

The producers flanked two Black journalists to provide a cover to a white journalist who is making an open, racist case for apartheid, and who suggests that human rights do not exist for Palestinians. A combination of racism and ignorance that suggests a deeply failed moral center for that show and that news operation.”

Posted on 2024-10-01T14:45:38+0000

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NotebookLM’s automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

Audio Overview is a fun new feature of Google’s NotebookLM which is getting a lot of attention right now. It generates a one-off custom podcast against content you provide, where …

Click to view the original at simonwillison.net

Hasnain says:

“Thomas Wolf suggested “paste the url of your website/linkedin/bio in Google’s NotebookLM to get 8 min of realistically sounding deep congratulations for your life and achievements from a duo of podcast experts”. I couldn’t resist giving that a go, so I gave it the URLs to my about page and my Twenty years of my blog post and got back this 10m45s episode (transcript), which was so complimentary it made my British toes curl with embarrassment”

Posted on 2024-10-01T06:56:42+0000

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Hasnain says:

“A growing body of social-science literature suggests that, yes, this is in fact quite different. The rise of sports gambling has caused a wave of financial and familial misery, one that falls disproportionately on the most economically precarious households. Six years into the experiment, the evidence is convincing: Legalizing sports gambling was a huge mistake.”

Posted on 2024-09-30T02:54:04+0000

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Hasnain says:

“On the matter of Israel’s man-made famine, Foer provides an interesting corroborating detail. In early April, national security adviser Jake Sullivan met with Israeli officials in the Situation Room and was prepared to tell them, “You’re about to be responsible for the third famine of the 21st century.” Sullivan never got to make his speech, because the Israelis sprang a new crisis on the White House by telling Sullivan they had just bombed an Iranian consulate in Syria, killing prominent Iranian military leaders.”

Posted on 2024-09-30T02:19:13+0000

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Communication a massive struggle in flooded North Carolina towns

Days after Helene swept through, cellphone and internet service is spotty to nonexistent. Desperate posts on social media seek information about loved ones.

Click to view the original at washingtonpost.com

Hasnain says:

Climate change is here. This is 4 hours away from any coast, 2k meters above sea level, and it still got leveled.

Also took out the world’s only source for quartz that’s used to make the crucibles for making silicon chips as I understand it.

““We have complete neighborhoods that are no longer there,” he said. “We’re just trying now to go to where these neighborhoods were and just try to do some sort of search-and-rescue in some of the houses that are still there.”
�Days after the rain subsided in the Southern Appalachians, numerous flood alerts were still in effect because of continued runoff and swollen waterways. Multiple flash flood emergencies, the most dire flood alert, were in effect Sunday for numerous lakes along the Catawba River in western North Carolina because of both “catastrophic and historic inflows” and dam releases that could lead to “life threatening” flooding downstream.”

Posted on 2024-09-29T18:13:47+0000

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As FTC Chair Lina Khan’s Term Expires, Democrats Are Torn Between Donors and Their Base

New polling shows roughly 80 percent of Democrats feel the government should be doing more to take on corporate monopolies. Still, prominent party donors are urging Kamala Harris to dump Lina Khan.

Click to view the original at wired.com

Hasnain says:

Appointing Khan has been the one unquestionably good thing Biden has done, I’d hate for that to be reversed later.

“Roughly 80 percent of Democrats feel that the government should be doing more to take on corporate monopolies, compared to only 3 percent who say it should be doing less, according to new polling. Nearly 90 percent of Democrats, meanwhile, feel that lobbyists and corporate executives hold too much power over the government.

The same poll, commissioned by the Tech Oversight Project, found that more than three-fourths of Democrats feel Big Tech wields monopoly power in ways that harm consumers and small businesses. Only 7 percent said the companies should face no repercussions, since they have continued to innovate.”

Posted on 2024-09-29T03:15:21+0000

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HPV vaccine study finds zero cases of cervical cancer among women vaccinated before age 14

In a large Scottish study, no cases of cervical cancer were found among women who received HPV vaccines before they turned 14.

Click to view the original at statnews.com

Hasnain says:

“historic new study out of Scotland shows the real-world impact of vaccines against the human papillomavirus: The country has detected no cases of cervical cancer in women born between 1988-1996 who were fully vaccinated against HPV between the ages of 12 and 13.

Many previous studies have shown that HPV vaccines are extremely effective in preventing cervical cancer. But the study, published on Monday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, is the first to monitor a national cohort of women over such a long time period and find no occurrence of cervical cancer.”

Posted on 2024-09-29T02:47:09+0000