Tag: Premium

Why Is This Ebola Outbreak Different From All The Other Ones? Ctd

Jason Koebler surveys the ongoing chaos as overwhelmed health workers struggle to contain the ebola outbreak:

“Every report I’m getting from the ground has health workers in a state of fear, and they’re feeling a siege from populations who despise and loathe them,” said Laurie Garrett, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations who won a Pulitzer Prize for her on-the-ground reporting on the ebola outbreak in Zaire in 1996, on a conference call this morning. “They’re saying ‘we are terrified, we are exhausted, we want to leave, can someone take over?’” … Problem is, there aren’t many people who can take over. Already, more than 60 healthcare workers have died from the disease, and the countries’ governments haven’t been very successful at shepherding their people—who have never seen the disease before, often don’t speak the same language as relief workers, and don’t fully grasp what’s going on—to treatment facilities.

That’s why you have things like riots outside of health care clinics and patients making escapes from ebola quarantine centers. Healthcare workers have been called “cannibals” by protesters, and Garrett said that workers she’s talked to have been accused of cutting patient’s arms off and selling them on the black market. In other words, the situation is fairly out of control, and it doesn’t look to be getting better anytime soon.

Debora MacKenzie, Philippa Skett and Clare Wilson offer their take on why this epidemic has been so severe:

The overriding factor could be urbanisation.

In the past, village outbreaks remained small, unless people went to hospitals. “Population size and high mobility make it hard to do contact tracing,” says Peter Walsh at the University of Cambridge. Cities provide more chances to spread the virus, something that may also have enabled the spread of HIV. According to the African Development Bank, the continent has had the world’s highest urban growth rate for 20 years, and the proportion of Africans living in cities will rise from 36 per cent to 60 per cent by 2050.

Other factors also favour the virus. Justin Masumu of the National Institute for Biomedical Research in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, found that the increase in Ebola outbreaks since 1994 is associated with changes in forest ecosystems due to deforestation, which displaces bats. The part of Guinea where this outbreak started has been largely deforested. What’s more, wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and corruption in Guinea, have caused poverty, says [Tulane public health professor Daniel] Bausch, leading people to migrate for work and spread the virus further. It has also caused widespread mistrust of officials, even in public health – just when Africa’s cities need them most.

Julia Belluz outlines the worst-case scenario:

Even if the outbreak didn’t move across any other country border, intensification within the already affected areas is the most immediate health threat. “The worst-case scenario is that the disease will continue to bubble on, like a persistent bushfire, never quite doused out,” said Derek Gatherer, a Lancaster University bioinformatician who has studied the evolution of this Ebola outbreak. “It may start to approach endemic status in some of the worst affected regions. This would have very debilitating effects on the economies of the affected countries and West Africa in general.”

This dire situation could come about because of a “persistent failure of current efforts,” he added. “Previous successful eradications of Ebola outbreaks have been via swamping the areas with medical staff and essentially cutting the transmission chains. Doing that here is going to be very difficult and expensive. We have little option other than to pump in resources and engage with the problem using the tried-and-tested strategy—but on a scale previously unused.”

But Tara C. Smith emphasizes that the chances of an ebola outbreak in the US remain extremely low:

Ebola is a virus with no vaccine or cure. Any scientist who wants to work with the live virus needs to have biosafety level 4 facilities (the highest, most secure labs in existence, abbreviated BSL-4) available to them. We have a number of those here in the United States, and people are working with many of the Ebola types here. Have you heard of any Ebola outbreaks occurring here in the United States? Nope. These scientists are highly trained and very careful, just like people treating these Ebola patients and working out all the logistics of their arrival and transport.

Second, you might not know that we’ve already experienced patients coming into the United States with deadly hemorrhagic fever infections. We’ve had more than one case of imported Lassa fever, another African hemorrhagic fever virus with a fairly high fatality rate in humans (though not rising to the level of Ebola outbreaks). One occurred in Pennsylvania, another in New York just this past April, a previous one in New Jersey a decade ago. … How many secondary cases occurred from those importations? None. Like Ebola, Lassa is spread from human to human via contact with blood and other body fluids. It’s not readily transmissible or easily airborne, so the risk to others in U.S. hospitals (or on public transportation or other similar places) is quite low.

“How Miscarriage Deepened My Thoughts On Abortion” Ctd

A fair number of readers are pushing back against the one who wrote, “If you could ban bodies from terminating pregnancies, banning doctors from terminating them might make a tiny bit more sense, at least intellectually. But you can’t, and it doesn’t.” One argues:

We can’t ban bodies from miscarriages any more than we can ban anyone from dying. Miscarriages are natural, as is death. But I don’t think the fact of my inevitable death should excuse anyone from killing me today. The issue isn’t whether miscarriages are natural, but whether it is moral to force a death where none would have otherwise occurred.

Another charges the reader with failing to make “a significant distinction”:

The great majority of miscarriages occur because the embryonic makeup was not consistent with life. In other words, nature selected the embryo for termination. With abortions, it’s not as clear.

While there are certainly many fetuses that are aborted which would have miscarried anyway, there are many (perhaps most?) that would have survived to full term and enjoyed lives as healthy and full as have you and I. In other words, nature did not select them for termination. Rather, a human being – usually the mother– decided not to give the fetus the chance to become fully human. That difference should give us all great pause.

By the way, I am pro-choice (albeit by default). But to say, “Nature terminates pregnancies; why shouldn’t we?” isn’t a very compelling case for the pro-choice movement. Nature does a lot of things that we as human beings feel morally obligated to transcend.

Another:

I nodded along in recognition as I read your reader’s email. Like her, my husband and I have suffered through a miscarriage (in our case at 10 weeks) and also, horrifyingly, a stillbirth at 24 weeks. However, when I reached the last paragraph, I was taken aback:

After I came back to work after being in the hospital, I told my boss I was doing okay, and that it’s such a common thing – a fact known almost exclusively to only two groups of people: doctors, and people who have had miscarriages. And she said, “No. It’s a big deal.” And I’m like, who the hell are you to tell me whether it’s a big deal or not? I feel the exact way about people who want to ban abortions.

I respect your reader’s viewpoint, and I’m not interested in telling other people how they should feel about a miscarriage or an abortion. For me, the fact that miscarriages are common (absolutely true) does not make them any less of a big deal; mine was a huge deal for us.  I can both see a 20-day embryo as a fragile clump of cells, and still mourn the potential, the hopes, the dreams, the life that it represents.

Another shares similar sentiments:

I have thought a lot about this subject over the past several years. Both my sister and I have had early miscarriages. She has had three (that I know of) and I have had two. My sister and her husband are conservative evangelicals, while my wife and I are pretty firmly pro-choice.

Make no mistake, having an early miscarriage is a terrible thing, particularly your first, when you have no idea how common they are. My sister, her husband, my wife, and myself all went through periods of horrible grief and a sense of loss after each miscarriage.

That being said, I think my sister has taken these losses much worse than my wife and I. If you asked her I think she would consider the miscarriages to be children that died. I can’t help but think she feels this way in large part because she hears over and over again that life begins at conception.

After our first miscarriage, my wife and I struggled to put into words what we felt like we had lost. It certainly was not a child. But just a grouping of cells seemed not quite right either. Eventually we came to think of it as promise, or hope of a child that had been taken from us. Painful, absolutely, but not on par with losing a child.

My wife is now six months pregnant with our first child. At this point if we were to lose her, I would feel that I have lost a child. I am not sure when that switch happens, but it absolutely on a continuum. A mass of cells does not seem to be a person, but a two-pound fetus that I have seen on a sonogram, and whom I have felt kick, most certainly is. I guess that goes to show you that this is a really complicated subject and not one that lends itself to a black-and-white interpretation of when life begins.

A word of thanks: Your Misery of Miscarriage series, as well as the It’s So Personal series on late-term abortions, really helped me put my own thoughts in order.  I don’t know where else you would find that variety of viewpoints on subjects that are generally so taboo.

Google, Crime Fighter

The company reported a sex offender to the police:

A Houston man was arrested after Google detected that he was trying to email sexually explicit photos of a young girl to his friend. After its data-crawling algorithms detected the images, Google tipped off the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which then alerted police. The man, John Henry Skillern, is now being held for $200,000 bail on charges of possessing child pornography.

Rich McCormick explains how Google’s algorithm works:

Google makes use of Microsoft’s PhotoDNA technology to scan emails, and calculate a mathematical hash for an image of child sexual abuse that allows it to recognize photos automatically even if they have been altered. The tech is now also used by both Twitter and Facebook, after Microsoft donated it to the NCMEC in 2009. Videos, too, have become the focus of such digital fingerprinting programs. Google has its own Video ID software for detecting footage of child sexual abuse, and British company Friend MTS donated its Expose F1 detection program to the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children (ICMEC) earlier this year.

While the technology has helped to halt the activities of people such as John Henry Skillern, the automated image detection systems used by Google and others have some flaws. For one, new pictures won’t be caught by software such as PhotoDNA: only images already recorded in the user’s database can be spotted. They also raise some privacy questions.

Lauren Williams looks at the legality of Google’s actions:

Courts largely support service providers monitoring content for child pornography as long as they don’t conspire with police to do so, Orin Kerr, a computer crime law professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., told ThinkProgress. “The big issue is the Fourth Amendment. Google needs to make sure that they are not acting as agents of the police,” he said.

Shafer fears where Google’s kiddie-porn offensive will lead:

Like cannibals, murderers, pedophiles and rapists, child pornographers — and customers of child pornography — constitute the worst of the human worst. They are the exemplars of the retrograde. Our natural impulse will always be to use whatever means, legal or technological, to expose and punish such unrepentant deviants.

Today, I’m fine with Web companies using scanning technology to uncover those who trade in child pornography. But the powers conjured up out of universal abhorrence have a way of spinning out of control, leading us to commit immoral acts in our pursuit of morality. It wasn’t that long ago that marrying across racial lines was a crime. Or that homosexual acts were punished by law. Or that pot smokers were jailed for decades. Or property covenants prevented Jews from buying properties.

Map Of The Day

Alison Abbott explains the genesis of the above video, which depicts 2,600 years of cultural change:

Maximilian Schich, an art historian at the University of Texas at Dallas, and his colleagues used the Google-owned knowledge base, Freebase, to find 120,000 individuals who were notable enough in their life-times that the dates and locations of their births and deaths were recorded. The list includes people ranging from Solon, the Greek lawmaker and poet, who was born in 637 bc in Athens, and died in 557 bc in Cyprus, to Jett Travolta – son of the actor John Travolta – who was born in 1992 in Los Angeles, California, and died in 2009 in the Bahamas.

The team used those data to create a movie that starts in 600 BC and ends in 2012. Each person’s birth place appears on a map of the world as a blue dot and their death as a red dot. The result is a way to visualize cultural history – as a city becomes more important, more notable people die there.

Mark Byrnes cautions:

Of course, devoting such a study to only ‘notable individuals’ of Europe and North America leaves out all sorts of people; most people, in fact.

The visualization of North American migration, for example, suggests the continent was uninhabited until Colonial times. The reason for the omission of so many kinds of people is quite simple: “[t]he poor are simply not as well recorded,” one of the researchers, Maximillian Schich, an asso­ciate pro­fessor in arts and tech­nology at the Uni­ver­sity of Texas at Dallas, tells National Geographic.

What we see in these videos is an example of how powerful data visualizations can be. But when it comes to charting thousands of years of world history, they’re still only as good as the records researchers can access.

Eliza Berman adds:

The video and accompanying article, which appear in Nature, an international science journal, have generated some criticism on Twitter, since Nature fails to qualify the phrase “visual history of human culture” with the words “Western” or “European.” Still others question how much the places where a man—and these are mostly men—was born and died can really tell us about cultural history.

These critiques are valid, and perhaps they’ll be addressed as Schich’s team releases further research. But if we take the video for what it is and nothing more—a mesmerizing view of the migrations of people whose contributions Western culture values—it’s a compelling look at the interplay between culture and geography.

Dissents Of The Day

A reader writes:

With regard to your post “The Last And First Temptation Of Israel,” let’s dispense with all pleasantries and call these racist warmongers what they are.  There is no excuse for this sort of language and belief and even under the worst of circumstances, you cannot justify it away.

With that said, a few things.  One, Feiglin is one of eight deputy speakers.  So, let’s be ISRAEL-PALESTINIANS-CONFLICT-GAZAclear that his power in Israel slightly less than you claimed. Second, while nothing can justify these comments, the fact remains that the government that controls Gaza outwardly supports the genocide of Jews and ethnic cleansing of Israel.  They were elected by the Palestinian people which, regardless of Israelis’ actions, means Palestinians voted for a party committed to genocide against the Jews.

Against this backdrop, I find it highly offensive that you are so narrowly focussed on the sins of Israel to the complete and utter exclusion of culpability of Hamas. Can you honestly say, given the sophisticated tunnels that were found, that there is no justification in Israel’s actions?  I know you’ll shoot back “but the settlements” and I will counter with “they should be dismantled, but, let’s protect lives while we wait for politicians to wise up.”

The idea that this blog has focused on Israeli sins “to the complete and utter exclusion of culpability of Hamas” seems to me a deluded function of how polarized this debate has become. I’ve repeatedly and vehemently used clear language to denounce Hamas’ tactics as war crimes and their ideology as poisonous. Yes, I’ve become deeply concerned about Israel’s lurch toward eliminationist rhetoric – but my focus on that is partly because the story is ignored by much of the US media, and also because Americans are financing Israel – and not Hamas – and Israel portrays itself as a Western society. Another reader notes:

I think you make too much of “deputy speaker” – here’s another person who currently holds that title:

Ahmad Tibi is an Arab-Israeli politician and leader of the Arab Movement for Change (Ta’al), an Arab party in Israel. He serves as a member of the Knesset (the Israeli Parliament) since 1999, and currently serves as Deputy Speaker of the Knesset. Tibi was acknowledged as a figure in the Israeli-Palestinian arena after serving as a political advisor to the late Palestinian president Yasser Arafat (1993-1999).

Another pulls no punches:

Andrew, your blog post was a total hack job and you should be embarrassed. I had a funny feeling during your postings about the latest Gaza conflict that you may have some cringe-worthy lapses in basic facts about both the Palestinian street and the Israel street. To exploit nutty extremists and malign Israelis in a rush job for your blog proves my theory that you really don’t know anything about Israel – and sadly, you probably don’t care because you’ve made up your mind.

The Times of Israel pulled the blog post from this asshole immediately, and nobody gives a shit about the deputy speaker or pays no attention to him. It’s like writing about David Duke and the late Fred Phelps to expose the real truth about Americans. If you actually knew about life in Israel you wouldn’t exploit these jerks or worse, take them seriously and somehow connect the dots to Israel character.

If you knew ANYTHING about life in Israel you would certainly understand that a majority of the population is secular, liberal and progressive (not at all like you portray in this blog post); including a very high profile and large LGBT community. You would also know that these very large moral issues, like what to do about about Hamas and civilian causalities, the occupation, etc, is front and center in the media, in coffee shop conversations and in the workplace. Most of the conversations include a firm rebuke of the nuts you’ve decided to highlight in your blog post.

You’re an idiot if you think this is Israel. You’re a bigger idiot if you’re exploiting this just to be provocative. You know you should go there and spend some time. See what it’s like to be living in a free and progressive society surrounded by utter lunacy and religious and sexual intolerance. It’s not fun.

On the other hand, another notes:

Speaking of voices in Israel advocating various forms of genocide: one you may have missed came earlier in the year in the Jerusalem Post calling the Armenian Genocide “permissible“:

Every nation has the right to employ whatever means it has to fight for its survival, and should not have to do so at the expense of its moral standing in the eyes of other nations. This is a belief both Israel and Turkey share.

Note that Haaretz recently published an article showing that the perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide presented the Jews in Palestine a brutally clear picture of how far “whatever means it has” extends:

A telegraph recently uncovered in the Turkish prime ministerial archive reinforces these accounts. Sent by the Turkish interior minister, Nazar Talaat, to the governor of Beirut, who also oversaw Zichron Yaakov, the telegraph read: “In the village of Zamrin (Zichron Yaakov,) in the Haifa district, the Kamikam (governor) told the people that if they do not hand over the spy Lishansky, their fate will be like the Armenians, as I am involved in the deaths of the Armenians.”

Another reader:

I have a few Israeli friends and have always been against the casual slaughter of Palestinians. My own support for the end of the war and criticism of the death of Gazan children has been vocal in situations both virtual and in physical conversation. I have discovered that there seems to be a violent pushback from many Israeli and Jewish people against my opinion (what a surprise!), usually revolving around the idea that A) I don’t understand B) You have no right to criticize us C) those in government don’t represent their opinion. Those are never fair reasons, because A) I do read enough to know B) I am human, the dead and injured are human and thus I have every right to have an opinion C) Then what are you doing about it.

I don’t mean to rant – but it would be helpful to readers to have a thread about this experience …. to share responses outside the media coverage. The mainstream coverage has been distorted and nothing has been said about how, one-to-one, others have been grappling with this. America has a unique position on this, as I live in New York (say what you will) and there is a huge number of Jews that have opinions about the conflict, nuanced or not, right or wrong. Compared to any other conflict, there seems to be a closer, perhaps more personal relationship with how we carry a discourse and there might be something valuable that a reader out there can share with the rest, beyond my own.

(Photo: Israeli residents, mostly from the southern Israeli city of Sderot, sit on a hill overlooking the Gaza Strip, on July 12, 2014, to watch the fighting between the Israeli army and Palestinian militants. By Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images)

The Troubling Triumph Of The Israeli Right

Tensions Remain High At Israeli Gaza Border

The Gaza conflict has fortified Israel’s right wing, Gregg Carlstrom admits:

Public opinion polls confirm the Israeli right’s gains during the current conflict. A survey conducted by the Knesset Channel last week found that the right-wing parties would win 56 seats in the next election, up from 43 last year. The center-left bloc would shrink from 59 seats to 48. Other surveys suggest that the right could win a majority by itself, without needing religious parties or centrists to form a coalition. But perhaps more striking is the public’s near-unanimous support for the Gaza war, from Israelis across the political spectrum. Roughly 90 percent of Jewish Israelis support the war, according to recent polls. Less than 4 percent believe the army has used “excessive firepower,” the Israel Democracy Institute found, though even Israeli officials admit that a majority of the 1,800 Palestinians killed so far are civilians.

Even scarier, Carlstrom adds, is that “this time, public dissent hasn’t just been silenced, it’s been all but smothered”:

A popular comedian was dumped from her job as the spokeswoman for a cruise line after she criticized the war. Local radio refused to air an advertisement from B’Tselem, a rights group, which simply intended to name the victims in Gaza. Scattered anti-war rallies have drawn small crowds, mostly in the low hundreds; the largest brought several thousand people to Tel Aviv on July 26. But most of the protests ended in violence at the hands of ultranationalists, who attacked them and set up roving checkpoints to hunt for “leftists” afterwards. Demonstrators have been beaten, pepper-sprayed, and bludgeoned with chairs.

In Assaf Sharon’s incisive reading of Israel’s recent history, this strain of ultra-nationalism has been years in the making:

The conventional wisdom is that Israel has moved to the right. But as public opinions and analyses of voting trends clearly show, this is not the case. Although the right has grown, its rise has been relatively small. Israelis remain evenly divided on peace and security, and the left enjoys a clear majority on social and economic issues. The deeper shift is not in the level of public support for the two political camps, but in their make-up.

On the right, the liberal and democratic elements have been overtaken by chauvinist populists. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s party, Likud, whose members used to walk out on [Rabbi Meir] Kahane, is now populated by some of the most vocal inciters. The last remnants of its democrats were ousted in the last primary elections, and the remaining moderates pander to the pugnacious extremists that dominate the party. The prime minister himself has maintained utter silence in the face of growing racism and political violence. The left, on the other hand, has lost its political stamina and its moral courage. A depletion of ideas, debilitation of institutions, and putrefaction of leadership have left it politically inert. The social mechanisms that kept Kahane’s racism at bay have all but disintegrated.

When the philosopher and public intellectual Yishayahu Leibovitz called Kahane and his followers “Judeo-Nazis,” not everyone agreed, but everybody listened. More importantly, many understood the threat he identified and were willing to combat it. Breaking the moral siege demands active and resolute opposition to Jewish jingoism, not ignoring it and certainly not accommodating it.

(Photo: Police keep right-wing supporters of Israel separated from left-wing protesters during a rally held by the left-wing calling for an end of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and for a ceasefire of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict on July 12, 2014 in Tel Aviv, Israel.At least one person was arrested and one person was injured. By Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

Three Red States Are Big Winners From Obamacare

A new Gallup survey illustrates the uneven impact of the law. HuffPo maps the data:

Uninsurance Rates

Margot Sanger-Katz contends that the “numbers demonstrate the big difference the Affordable Care Act could have for the country’s poorer states”:

I’ve written before about the “two Americas” in health care, with richer Democratic-leaning states expanding coverage to more of their populations and poorer Republican-leaning states sitting out the expansion.

According to the new Gallup poll, Arkansas and Kentucky have had the largest reductions in uninsured rates in the country. Arkansas reduced its rate by more than 10 percentage points, to 12.4 percent from 22.5 percent last year; the rate in Kentucky declined by 8.5 percentage points. (The margin of sampling error for the results varies by state size, but is around plus or minus two percentage points for those two.) West Virginia also made Gallup’s top-10 list. These three states had very high numbers of residents who lacked insurance and qualified for the new public programs; it is not a surprise that, with a commitment to these new programs, they saw significant coverage gains.

It’s one of the great tragedies of the last few years: that a black president offered many poor white states a healthcare law that would help them more than others – and most chose to reject it. I mean, it’s not as if Massachusetts needed it. Cohn draws attention to the tangible consequences of states opposing Obamacare:

[T]he numbers do suggest a pattern, one Gallup’s own researchers observe. The states that made the most headway covering the uninsured, according to Gallup, are states in which officials decided to build their own insurance marketplaces and to make all low-income people eligible for Medicaid, as the Affordable Care Act originally envisioned.

Obamacare Impact

Pivoting off the Gallup numbers, Greg Sargent asserts that Obamacare is becoming less central to this year’s campaigns:

All of these little data points help tell a larger story, which Politico told really well today: The fading of Obamacare as an issue in many states, including those with hard fought Senate races with massive expenditures such as those from the Koch group. To be sure, Dems very well could lose control of the Senate. But it is becoming increasingly accepted that even if that does happen, Obamacare might not be a major reason why — the makeup of the map and the economy could prove far more important in determining the outcome.

Busting Hamas’ Nihilism

An Indian news crew managed to capture this rare video footage of a rocket being fired from a densely populated residential area in Gaza yesterday morning, less than an hour before the ceasefire went into effect:

Michael Peck discusses why this is significant:

The film clip doesn’t show an Israeli retaliatory strike. But if there was one, it would have struck a built-up area, possibly injuring civilians. And there’s no way Hamas could not have been aware of that. By the way, the Indian film crew didn’t release the film until after they left Gaza, apparently in order to avoid retaliation by an image-conscious Hamas.

What can we conclude? From a military standpoint, a rocket that can fit under a small tent is going to be tough to eliminate with an air strike or artillery barrage. It takes troops on the ground. … It also illustrates exactly why guerrillas and irregular armies so often can prevail, or at least endure, against superior forces. Rockets and mortars are easy to assemble and fire. The launch crew can vacate before warplanes or artillery responds. When the counter-bombardment inevitably comes, civilians get hurt and the guerrillas gain support.

But Seth Lazar doesn’t buy Israel’s argument that Hamas’ use of human shields justifies bombing civilians:

[O]ne might think that Hamas’ joint responsibility provides some grounds for discounting the weight of those innocent civilians’ lives when tallying up the bad effects of the IDF’s actions. Suppose that Hamas were to literally treat innocent civilians as hostages by advertising an intention to kill a certain number of them should the IDF not withdraw. Then many would think it plausible that those deaths should not receive the same weight in the proportionality calculation as those directly inflicted by the IDF, in part because of the ‘intervening agency’ of Hamas. Perhaps human shields are analogous to hostages in this way.

We should resist this conclusion. Innocent people’s lives have weight in the proportionality calculation because of their moral status—their right to life. This status, and these protections, cannot be diminished by the impermissible actions of some third party.

Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch reports possible Israeli war crimes in Khuza’a:

On the morning of July 23, Israeli forces ordered a group of about 100 Palestinians in Khuza’a to leave a home in which they had gathered to take shelter, family members said. The first member to leave the house, Shahid al-Najjar, had his hands up but an Israeli soldier shot him in the jaw, seriously injuring him. Israeli soldiers detained the men and boys over age 15 in an area close to the Gaza perimeter fence. Based on statements from witnesses and news reports, some were taken to Israel for questioning. Israeli forces released others that day, in small separate groups. As one group walked unarmed to Khan Younis, Israeli soldiers fired on them, killing one and wounding two others.

Two older men whom Israeli forces briefly detained near the perimeter fence had been seriously wounded in earlier Israeli bombardments and died soon after being released, two witnesses said. The laws of war provide that wounded civilians and combatants should be given necessary medical care to the fullest extent practicable and with the least possible delay. In another incident on July 23, Israeli soldiers fired on a group of civilians who had been told to leave their home in Khuza’a, killing Mohammed al-Najjar, a witness said.

Hamas And The Teen Murders

That’s the current line from the Israeli government on the disputed authorization for the murder of three teens in the West Bank. Eli Lake follows up:

Israeli news reports say Qawasmeh acknowledged during interrogations that he received money and direction from Hamas leaders in Gaza to conduct the June 15 kidnapping. He was arrested trying to flee to Jordan using phony identification. Shaul Bartal, an expert on Hamas and a reservist major in the Israel Defense Force for military intelligence, told The Daily Beast on Tuesday that the arrest of Qawasmeh was a smoking gun, but he also said it’s doubtful that Hamas leaders gave specific instructions to kidnap the three teenagers. “It seems Hamas leadership in Gaza gave an order, but the order was more general,” he said.

I remain confused about the term “kidnapping.” The teens were murdered almost as soon as they were captured. I also remain confused as to how – since we are now told the evidence came after the arrest of Qawasmeh – Netanyahu was able to know immediately that Hamas was institutionally responsible. It seems clear that the murders were not some random criminal act, and that Hamas sympathizers and renegades were involved, broadly authorized by Hamas. Beyond that? I doubt anyone intended it to be a casus belli. But Netanyahu made it one.

The NYT Caves Further To Sponsored Content

At first, they were never going to do it; then they were going to do it just a little, with very high standards; now, they’re lowering those standards so as to blur even further the difference between an advertisement and an article. And this is the crown jewel of American journalism: the New York Times. AdAge has the scoop:

The New York Times has shrunk the labels that distinguish articles bought by advertisers from articles generated in its newsroom and made the language in the labels less explicit … Recent Paid Posts from Chevron and Netflix have replaced the blue moat that enclosed [an earlier] native ad with a slimmer blue line running only along the top. “Paid For And Posted By” has been trimmed to to “Paid Post,” and in slightly smaller type. The company logos, also slightly smaller, appear in a white bar that’s not as tall as Dell’s dark blue bar. And because Chevron and Netflix didn’t write their Paid Posts, their logos don’t appear by the author’s name. Instead “T Brand Studio,” the unit within the Times that produces content on behalf of advertisers, appears off to the left.

Here’s why:

“Some form of labeling is necessary to make sure no one feels deceived, but beyond that I don’t think they need to have blinking lights,” said Scott Donaton, chief content officer at UM. “In general, if a client is going to create content, they don’t want the thing dressed up in way that pushes audiences away from it,” he added.

So to clearly label an advertisement an advertisement “pushes audiences away.” So the goal is to provide the smallest fig-leaf possible that gives the NYT plausible deniability of outright deception. And that’s entirely because of corporate pressure. Look at this page and see if you think most people would know it’s bought and paid for by an advertiser.

Now check out the Washington Times’ latest gambit with the Washington Redskins:

In 2000, then-editor Wes Pruden of the Washington Times blasted Dan Snyder’s efforts to control the flow of information about the Redskins as “chickenshit” tactics. Last week, the same newspaper agreed to give that same owner unprecedented control over that same flow of information about the same team. And all parties celebrated the deal. “The Washington Times and the Washington Redskins announced a unique partnership that will make the newspaper a content and marketing partner of the team,” said the joint press release.

And check out Condé Nast’s new venture as a marketer for Monsanto:

Screen Shot 2014-08-06 at 12.36.38 PM

Let me repeat: “Each episode will be stylishly arranged in a controlled environment, to create an authoritative and journalistic forum.” If you want your journalism stylishly arranged in a controlled environment to buttress the brand of a corporation, then you know to go read Condé Nast publications.