He also cham­pi­oned a Samoan anti-vaxxer tied to the 2019 lethal erup­tion that killed scores of chil­dren.

Our find­ings indi­cate that Israel’s mil­i­tary cam­paign in Gaza is organ­ised, sys­tem­atic, and intended to destroy con­di­tions of life and life-sus­taining infras­truc­ture.
To this end, ‘A Cartography of Genocide’ plat­form and accom­pa­nying report develops a com­pre­hen­sive map­ping of mil­i­tary con­duct in Gaza since 7 October 2023. It deploys a range of methods to observe the ways in which Israel’s mil­i­tary oper­a­tions engen­dered widespread harm and sug­gests how these obser­va­tions might inform broader assess­ments of Israel’s mil­i­tary con­duct during this period.
We use here the term ‘geno­cide’ within the meaning devel­oped by Raphael Lemkin, whose thinking behind this term was instru­mental for the def­i­ni­tion for­mu­lated in Article II of the Genocide Convention. Genocide, according to Lemkin, sig­ni­fies a coor­di­nated plan of actions aimed at the destruc­tion of essen­tial foun­da­tions of the life of national groups, with the aim of anni­hi­lating the groups them­selves.

Limbs scat­tered on the streets, shel­ters set ablaze, hun­dreds trapped inside hos­pi­tals: Palestinians detail the apoc­a­lyptic scenes of Israel’s latest cam­paign.

The co-lead of the world’s largest ever genetic study into ME calls for a rad­ical change in how society deals with the dis­ease.

Anyone should be able to make a web­site with HTML if they want. This book will teach you how to do just that. It doesn’t require any pre­vious expe­ri­ence making web­sites or coding. I will cover every­thing you need to know to get started in an approach­able and friendly way.
Ready? Let’s do it!

Many female data workers in Nairobi endure sexual, mental, and phys­ical abuse. This zine sheds light on their expe­ri­ences as women, mothers, and migrants working as con­tent mod­er­a­tors at Sama.

But to end poverty in all its forms every­where, studying this poverty line alone is not enough. Economists have tried offering alter­na­tives, but those can also fall short. For example, one widely used and much-cited frame­work, known as doughnut eco­nomics, aims to define “a safe and just space for humanity to thrive in” and assess whether people have what they need to live “a life of dig­nity and oppor­tu­nity.” The line that this frame­work pro­motes, how­ever, is just barely higher than the U.N.’s mea­sure of extreme poverty. It posits that just $3.10 per day gives people a chance to live such a life.
This claim is clearly at odds with our con­cep­tion of poverty. An income of $3.10 per day means just $93 per month, or $1,131 per year. Few people would think of them­selves as thriving on that income.
The misuse of low poverty lines as a cri­te­rion for what is suf­fi­cient for a good life dis­torts our per­cep­tion of people’s living con­di­tions. The reality is that we live in a world in which bil­lions are strug­gling to pay for the bare neces­si­ties: Three bil­lion people cannot afford a healthy diet. Three and a half bil­lion do not have access to san­i­ta­tion facil­i­ties. Most of them live on more than two or three dol­lars a day, but they are still living in deep mate­rial des­ti­tu­tion. To claim that they can live “a life of dig­nity and oppor­tu­nity” I find eth­i­cally repul­sive. It negates the misery of bil­lions.
To make global poverty’s true extent vis­ible, the U.N. should add a second, higher poverty line and give it equal impor­tance, set­ting it at a level that makes the poverty in every country vis­ible while matching our sense of what it means to be free from poverty.
Where would this poverty line be drawn? The existing inter­na­tional poverty line is based on an average of the poverty lines of sev­eral very poor coun­tries. The devel­op­ment economist Lant Pritchett has sug­gested fol­lowing the same logic to draw a higher inter­na­tional poverty line. I fol­lowed this sug­ges­tion, col­lecting nation­ally set poverty lines from a wide range of high-income coun­tries, as well as con­sid­ering pro­posals for uni­versal basic incomes, social secu­rity pay­ments and survey results about where poverty lines should be drawn.
Taking these ref­er­ences into account, my sug­ges­tion is to set a higher poverty line at $30 per day. Based on this cutoff, the map below shows where things stand today. In most coun­tries, almost everyone lives in poverty. And it also shows that, as we all know, even in the world’s richest coun­tries, a sub­stan­tial share of the pop­u­la­tion lives in poverty.

Much of the hesi­tancy to make new medicines stems from the eva­sive nature of long COVID itself. The con­di­tion is mul­ti­sys­temic, affecting the brain, heart, endocrine net­work, immune system, repro­duc­tive organs, and gas­troin­testinal tract. While researchers are finding increasing evi­dence for some of the dis­ease’s mech­a­nisms, like viral per­sis­tence, immune dys­reg­u­la­tion, and mito­chon­drial dys­func­tion, they might not uncover a one-size-fits-all treat­ment.

Ok, COVID is a problem. What can we do about it anyway?

Similar to highway expan­sion, the avail­ability of autonomous vehi­cles will likely lead people to take longer motor vehicle trips or opt for a car when they would have other­wise used transit, biked, or stayed home. The result will be a lot more (now autonomous) cars on the road. As the University of Virginia his­to­rian Peter Norton wrote in a pre­scient 2014 article, self-driving tech­nology could lead people to “spend more total time in vehi­cles [and] use them for even more tasks.”
Norton, who teaches the Jevons paradox in his classes, told me that he wrote that article because he “was seeing smart engi­neers argue, to my utter aston­ish­ment, that [AVs’] effi­ciency against would only bring sav­ings — with no coun­ter­acting costs. How they can con­tin­u­ally deny this ele­men­tary fact is beyond me.”

France has been plunged into fur­ther polit­ical chaos after Emmanuel Macron refused to name a prime min­ister from the left­wing coali­tion that won the most par­lia­men­tary seats in the snap elec­tion last month.
The pres­i­dent had hoped con­sul­ta­tions would break the polit­ical dead­lock caused by the elec­tion that left the Assemblée Nationale divided into three roughly equal blocks – left, centre and far right – none of which has a majority of seats.
After two days of talks with party and par­lia­men­tary leaders to break the stale­mate and allow him to name a prime min­ister with cross-party sup­port, Macron’s deci­sion not to choose the New Popular Front’s can­di­date was met with anger and threats of impeach­ment.
In a state­ment released on Monday evening, the Elysée described the dis­cus­sions on Friday and during the day as “fair, sin­cere and useful” but said they had failed to result in a work­able solu­tion.
A gov­ern­ment formed by the left­wing alliance the New Popular Front (NFP) – com­prising France Unbowed (LFI), the Socialist party (PS), the Greens (EELV) and the Communist party (PCF) – would lead to an imme­diate vote of no con­fi­dence and a col­lapse of the gov­ern­ment, Macron said explaining his deci­sion.

After the geno­cide ends, Palestinians in Israel will have to live beside those who spent the past year cheering and par­tic­i­pating in Gaza’s slaughter.

Last week, Nassau County, on New York’s Long Island, became the first county in the US to ban the public wearing of masks—with very vague health exemp­tion­s—s­ince the start of the Covid-19 pan­demic. The Nassau ban fol­lows a sim­i­larly con­tro­ver­sial statewide mask ban in North Carolina that took effect in June.
Several con­cerns have been raised about Nassau’s mask ban, including that police offi­cer­s—not experts in public health or medicine—are tasked with deter­mining whether an indi­vidual is wearing a mask for valid health rea­sons. But another is that the pan­demic is not over, and wearing med­ical masks while gro­cery shop­ping or even at a protest is meant to limit expo­sure to the dis­ease—and some res­i­dents expect a ban to lead to harass­ment by local anti-maskers.
The county’s move has prompted the first class-action law­suit against a mask ban, filed Thursday in fed­eral dis­trict court by Disability Rights New York against Nassau County and county exec­u­tive Bruce Blakeman on behalf of two anony­mous res­i­dents.
“This mask ban poses a direct threat to public health and dis­crim­i­nates against people with dis­abil­i­ties,” said Timothy A. Clune, the group’s exec­u­tive director, in a press release.

In one of the latest studies to emerge – a pre-print paper still under­going peer review that is posted online by the National Institutes of Health – researchers found a par­tic­u­larly con­cerning accu­mu­la­tion of microplas­tics in brain sam­ples.
An exam­i­na­tion of the livers, kid­neys and brains of autop­sied bodies found that all con­tained microplas­tics, but the 91 brain sam­ples con­tained on average about 10 to 20 times more than the other organs. The results came as a shock, according to the study’s lead author Matthew Campen, a tox­i­col­o­gist and pro­fessor of phar­ma­ceu­tical sciences at the University of New Mexico.
The researchers found that 24 of the brain sam­ples, which were col­lected in early 2024, mea­sured on average about 0.5% plastic by weight.
“It’s pretty alarming,” Campen said. “There’s much more plastic in our brains than I ever would have imag­ined or been com­fort­able with.”
The study describes the brain as “one of the most plastic-pol­luted tis­sues yet sam­pled”.

Corporations can and have been held liable for pro­viding mate­rial sup­port in war crimes during pre­vious con­flicts. In the Nuremberg trials, cor­po­rate offi­cials were held directly respon­sible for their mate­rial assis­tance to crimes com­mitted by the Nazi regime. In a recent land­mark civil ruling, Chiquita was ordered to pay $38m to the fam­i­lies of Colombian men mur­dered by a paramil­i­tary group financed by the US fruit com­pany between 1997 and 2004.
The UN has guiding prin­ci­ples for busi­nesses and other non-state actors on their obli­ga­tions to respect human rights and abide by inter­na­tional human­i­tarian law and inter­na­tional crim­inal law, over and above com­pli­ance with national laws.
“Cor­po­ra­tions sup­plying jet fuel and oil to Israel may be pro­viding mate­rial sup­port to the mil­i­tary, aware of its fore­see­able harmful effects, and there­fore risk com­plicity in war crimes, geno­cide and other crimes under inter­na­tional law,” said Dr Irene Pietropaoli, senior fellow in busi­ness and human rights at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law.

The recent shak­i­ness in the stock market has everyone talking about the AI bubble. To be sure, the con­cerns didn’t come out of nowhere. Critics have been calling AI another mix of tech fan­tasy and finan­cial bubble since soon after ChatGPT’s release at the end of 2022 because we know how these cycles work. More recently, estab­lish­ment voices like Goldman Sachs and Sequoia Capital joined the chorus.
There’s no ques­tion tech stocks are over­valued and that part of that comes from the hype behind gen­er­a­tive AI. The ques­tion isn’t whether there will be a market cor­rec­tion, but when it will happen and how deep the decline will be. It seems quite cer­tain that while the recent stock market volatility did hint at under­lying con­cerns about tech val­u­a­tions, it was ulti­mately driven much more by growing ques­tions about the Japanese market that briefly shook the wider con­fi­dence of investors.
I’m not going to pre­tend to gaze into a crystal ball and come back with an answer as to when this bubble will burst, but I do think it’s time we start thinking about the after­math of the cor­rec­tion instead of just what’s hap­pening right this moment — though that’s impor­tant to watch too. Tech bub­bles operate on a cycle, but there’s also a cycle to the after­math of the crash, where atten­tion starts to move on before the tech itself has been prop­erly taken care of.

Long COVID is a $1 tril­lion problem with no cure. Experts plead for gov­ern­ments to wake up

The first myth that but­tresses the gig economy is in its name: the word “gig.” “Gig” is a word that was first used to describe jazz acts at clubs in the ’20s—a far cry from the type of work that 41 mil­lion people in the US engage with today. Today, for most, gig work is not a fun hobby, an optional extracur­ric­ular, or a side hustle to earn extra pocket money. In fact, for more than two-thirds of workers on these apps, the job is a full-time haul. Most gig workers I spoke to work over­time, meaning the patch­work of jobs from apps they can cobble together often over­takes the forty hours we typ­i­cally asso­ciate with a work­week.
The eight-hour workday was a hard-won vic­tory by labor orga­nizers of yes­terday. Today, gig cor­po­ra­tions are actively under­mining those vic­to­ries. In Hustle and Gig, soci­ol­o­gist Alexandrea Ravenelle details past labor strug­gles that afforded many workers pro­tec­tions like the forty-hour work­week. She puts gig workers’ exclu­sion from these pro­tec­tions plainly: “Gig economy workers are often second class cit­i­zens in the labor world, denied many of the same rights taken for granted by workers in the main­stream economy.”
Shawnta, one GigSmart worker I inter­viewed, is active on four dif­ferent app­s—In­sta­work, GigSmart, Wonolo, and WorkWhile—through which she does a range of work, from house­keeping to birthday party setup to ware­housing. She told me she clocks in about fifty to sixty hours each week. Jay, another GigSmart worker, sim­i­larly has done gigs as diverse as col­lege food ser­vice and even a dinosaur-suit per­for­mance. They don’t par­tic­u­larly enjoy the jobs, and wouldn’t rec­om­mend them to friends, but admit, “It’s a good thing if you need fifty bucks today.”

Some of L.A.’s poorest fam­i­lies received cash assis­tance of $1,000 a month as part of a 12-month pilot pro­ject launched nearly three years ago. There were no strings attached and they could use the money how­ever they saw fit.
Now, a new study finds that the city-funded pro­gram was over­whelm­ingly ben­e­fi­cial.
Participants in the pro­gram expe­ri­enced a host of finan­cial ben­e­fits, according to an anal­ysis co-authored by University of Pennsylvania and UCLA researchers. Beyond that, the study found, the ini­tia­tive gave people the time and space to make deeper changes in their lives. That included landing better jobs, leaving unsafe living con­di­tions and escaping abu­sive rela­tion­ships.
“If you are trapped in finan­cial scarcity, you are also trapped in time scarcity,” Dr. Amy Castro, co-founder of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Guaranteed Income Research, told The Times. “There’s no time for your­self; there’s no time for your kids, your neigh­bors or any­body else.”

Australians are still dying at higher rates than before the pan­demic, reflecting how COVID-19’s lin­gering effects may be driving a sus­tained increase in death and dis­ease around the globe.
Excess mor­tality — the increase above the expected toll had the pan­demic not occurred — was 5% for Australia in 2023, the Sydney-based Actuaries Institute said in a report Monday, sig­nif­i­cantly higher than the 1% to 2% excess seen in years of crushing sea­sonal influenza epi­demics.
The ele­vated toll in a country with high COVID-19 vac­ci­na­tion rates reveals the long tail of a pan­demic that not only caused the most deaths in a cen­tury, but left many sur­vivors with lin­gering ail­ments, and dis­rupted med­ical care for patients with other con­di­tions. More than four years on, hos­pi­tals are still grap­pling with an unex­pected increase in coro­nary artery dis­ease.
"COVID will con­tinue to have an impact for some years to come,” actuary Karen Cutter, a spokesperson for the insti­tute’s mor­tality working group, said. "The ‘new normal’ level of mor­tality is likely to be higher than it would have been if we hadn’t had the pan­demic.”
The Australian find­ings sup­port growing evi­dence that COVID-19 wors­ened health across pop­u­la­tions, espe­cially the elderly and marginal­ized racial and ethnic minority groups, reset­ting the base­line for expected mor­tality.

Joe Biden just quit the pres­i­den­tial cam­paign. In his with­drawal letter touting his achieve­ments, he says we ‘over­came the pan­demic.’ A letter he wrote while lit­er­ally sick with the pan­demic virus. For a third time. Does this mean we over­came the pan­demic?

J. D. Vance wishes to foment what he sees as a class war — not between labor and cap­ital, but between the white cit­i­zenry and the “elites” of the uni­ver­si­ties and the media, who pour poison into the ears of the country and cor­rode its virtue and integrity by strip­ping away your jobs, cor­rupting your kids, and sending drug-laden for­eigners into your com­mu­nity. Within this false class pol­i­tics, the suf­fering of working-class people is under­stood in con­spir­a­to­rial rather than struc­tural terms. There is no his­tor­ical logic to class inequality and exploita­tion, only inex­pli­cable and unique acts of cru­elty.

Covid-19 cases are rising, yet a number of cities and states are proposing dan­gerous mask bans, in the mis­guided belief that it will improve public safety.

Counting the dead in Gaza: dif­fi­cult but essen­tial

Think you’ve grasped the full extent of COVID’s ongoing impact? Think again. As Americans shrug off vac­cines and forget indoor air quality, the virus stealthily con­tinues its destruc­tive path. This was pretty much inevitable without new guid­ance urging a change in strategy and nobody telling us the full truth.
The danger is clear and pre­sent: COVID isn’t merely a res­pi­ra­tory ill­ness; it’s a multi-dimen­sional threat impacting brain func­tion, attacking almost all of the body’s organs, pro­ducing ele­vated risks of all kinds, and weak­ening our ability to fight off other dis­eases. Reinfections are thought to pro­duce cumu­la­tive risks, and Long COVID is on the rise. Unfortunately, Long COVID is now being con­sid­ered a long-term chronic ill­ness — some­thing many people will never fully recover from.

Medical com­plicity in tor­ture extends fur­ther beyond indi­vidual physi­cians to the entirety of the Israeli med­ical system. Palestinian detainees recount that inter­roga­tors are trained in methods of abuse that are designed to inflict max­imum harm. This knowl­edge is not innate; rather, according to Cell 26 med­ical research is shared with Israeli occu­pa­tion inter­roga­tors to arm them with specific tech­niques and pro­grams of tor­ture intended to cause extreme suf­fering to Palestinian detainees while leaving min­imal phys­ical evi­dence.
Since October 7, inves­ti­ga­tions and tes­ti­monies from sur­vivors of tor­ture, advo­cates, human rights orga­ni­za­tions, and even some Israeli whistle­blowers have con­firmed that the involve­ment of Israeli physi­cians in tor­ture is still ongoing. On April 16, an appalling report by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency on the tor­ture of Gazan detainees stated that when attempting to receive med­ical assis­tance to treat injuries caused by tor­ture, Palestinian pris­oners were instead beaten more by prison doc­tors.

Climate change series name We asked 380 top cli­mate sci­en­tists what they felt about the future... Hopeless and broken Ruth Cerezo-Mota Mexico Hopeless and broken Ruth Cerezo-Mota Mexico (...)

Locals report Israeli quad­copters drawing people out of their houses by playing sounds of women and chil­dren in dis­tress

Viruses are bad for kids’ health. Public health is a col­lec­tive effort. Liberals no longer believe either.

In 2021, a book titled “The Human-Machine Team: How to Create Synergy Between Human and Artificial Intelligence That Will Revolutionize Our World” was released in English under the pen name “Bri­gadier General Y.S.” In it, the author — a man who we con­firmed to be the cur­rent com­mander of the elite Israeli intel­li­gence unit 8200 — makes the case for designing a spe­cial machine that could rapidly pro­cess mas­sive amounts of data to gen­erate thou­sands of poten­tial “tar­gets” for mil­i­tary strikes in the heat of a war. Such tech­nology, he writes, would resolve what he described as a “human bot­tle­neck for both locating the new tar­gets and deci­sion-making to approve the tar­gets.”
Such a machine, it turns out, actu­ally exists. A new inves­ti­ga­tion by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals that the Israeli army has devel­oped an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-based pro­gram known as “Lavender,” unveiled here for the first time. According to six Israeli intel­li­gence offi­cers, who have all served in the army during the cur­rent war on the Gaza Strip and had first-hand involve­ment with the use of AI to gen­erate tar­gets for assas­si­na­tion, Lavender has played a cen­tral role in the unprece­dented bombing of Palestinians, espe­cially during the early stages of the war. In fact, according to the sources, its influ­ence on the mil­i­tary’s oper­a­tions was such that they essen­tially treated the out­puts of the AI machine “as if it were a human deci­sion.”

Some people who devel­oped long Covid during the pan­demic — espe­cially those in the gig economy — are now unable to sup­port them­selves.

'As I turn 50, I am filled with mixed emo­tions. I dread what lies ahead if I reach 60,' writes Alice Wong.

Long COVID is a thorn in the side of “back to normal.” Attempts to silence patients are inten­si­fying.

This week the European Parliament will vote on amend­ments to the Commission’s pro­posed reg­u­la­tion of the European Parliament and the Council on com­pul­sory licensing for crisis man­age­ment. The idea is that in times of crises, there should be effi­cient means to access needed coun­ter­mea­sures, including via com­pul­sory licensing. Alarmingly, some of the pro­posed amend­ments may make the reg­u­la­tion unwork­able.

“God, when I said I wanted to be a little boy, I didn’t mean it like this.†That’s how Cy, a 23-year-old trans man, described how he feels living with the severe phys­ical pain and neu­ro­log­ical (...)

Aaron’s choice was a polit­ical action arising from his deeply held anar­chist con­vic­tions. In the fol­lowing col­lec­tion, we share Aaron’s own sum­mary of his pol­i­tics, fol­lowed by tes­ti­mony from three of Aaron’s close friends.

“This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.” These words of Aaron’s haunt us. He is right. We are rapidly entering an era in which human life is treated as worth­less. Let’s admit that the kind of protest activity that has taken place thus far in the United States has not served to compel the US gov­ern­ment to compel a halt to the geno­cide in Gaza. It is an open ques­tion what could accom­plish that. Aaron’s action chal­lenges us to answer this ques­tion.

The wealthy have dif­ferent houses, dif­ferent cars, dif­ferent lifestyles from the rest of us. These days, they also want to breathe dif­ferent air.

There has been a surge in cases of sca­bies and measles – both highly con­ta­gious – as well as rickets and scurvy, con­di­tions we thought had been erad­i­cated. Are public health cuts to blame?

A new study pro­vides the first con­crete data showing that many of these excess deaths were indeed uncounted COVID-19 deaths. The study com­pared reported COVID-19 deaths to excess deaths due to non-COVID, nat­ural causes, such as dis­eases and chronic ill­nesses, and found that increases in non-COVID excess deaths occurred at the same time or in the month prior to increases in reported COVID-19 deaths in most US coun­ties.

Years of aus­terity, fol­lowed by Covid, have left Britain with unhealthy workers and busi­nesses strug­gling to recruit, but the road to recovery, of all kinds, will be long.

Israel’s war on Gaza has com­pletely dis­rupted the edu­ca­tional system, with at least 94 pro­fes­sors killed so far.

Satellite imagery and open-source evi­dence lay bare the destruc­tion to civilian infras­truc­ture by Israel in its war on Hamas

Public health cannot be indi­vid­u­al­ized. Abandoning col­lec­tive approaches to dis­ease mit­i­ga­tion is a recipe for dis­aster.

Lighting up Long Covid
An impor­tant new mech­a­nistic study and a blitz of other reports that help our under­standing
Eric Topol