Month: December 2023
An Extraordinary Introduction to the Birth of Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT7uLSLunL0
Hamas used horrific sexual violence, raping and mutilating Israeli women and girls on October 7: NYT
“A harrowing new report by The New York Times detailed horrific accounts of sexual violence carried out by Hamas during its October 7 terrorist attacks on Israel.
Allegations of rape were made almost immediately after the attacks, which Israel said left some 1,200 people dead.
But many of the accounts were not from direct witnesses, sparking debates about whether they could be relied upon.
The Times said it carried out exhaustive work on its investigation, citing more than 150 interviews, video footage, photos, and GPS data.
It concluded that in at least seven locations women and girls appeared to have been the victims of sexual assaults or mutilations.
One witness interviewed by the outlet was Sapir, a 24-year-old accountant who only gave her first name.
She said she saw gunmen rape and kill at least five women while she was hiding near Route 232, around four miles southwest of the Nova music festival, which was targeted by Hamas on October 7.
She told the outlet that she saw “about 100 men” as they dished out weapons and passed wounded women between them.
In a particularly disturbing and graphic account, Sapir said that she saw the attackers cut the breast off of one woman as she was being raped and pass it between them before throwing it on the ground. “They play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road.”
“That day, I became an animal,” Sapir said. “I was emotionally detached, sharp, just the adrenaline of survival. I looked at all this as if I was photographing them with my eyes, not forgetting any detail. I told myself: I should remember everything.”
Another witness, Raz Cohen, said he survived the attacks by hiding in the dried-up bed of a stream along Route 232. He told the Times that he saw five men dragging a young, naked woman across the ground.
“I saw the men standing in a half circle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words,” Cohen said.
“Then one of them raises a knife,” he added, “and they just slaughtered her.””
https://www.yahoo.com/news/hamas-used-horrific-sexual-violence-131412764.html
Israel’s Gaza bombing campaign is the most destructive of this century, analysts say
https://www.yahoo.com/news/israels-gaza-bombing-campaign-most-090000040.html
OxyContin’s Reformulation Linked to Rising Suicides by Children
“The root cause of such perverse effects was the substitution that occurred after the old version of OxyContin was retired. Nonmedical users turned to black-market alternatives that were more dangerous because their potency was highly variable and unpredictable—a hazard that was compounded by the emergence of illicit fentanyl as a heroin booster and substitute. The fallout from the reformulation of OxyContin is one example of a broader tendency: Interventions aimed at reducing the harm caused by substance abuse frequently have the opposite effect.
From 1988 to 2010, Powell notes in the journal Demography, the suicide rate among 10-to-17-year-olds fell by 36 percent. That drop was “followed by eight consecutive years of increases—resulting in an 83% increase in child suicide rates.” Based on interstate differences in nonmedical use of OxyContin prior to 2010, Powell estimates that “the reformulation of OxyContin can explain 49% of the rise in child suicides.”
Since “the evidence suggests that children’s illicit opioid use did not increase,” Powell says, it looks like “the illicit opioid crisis engendered higher suicide propensities by increasing suicidal risk factors for children,” such as child neglect and “alter[ed] household living arrangements.” He notes a prior study that found “states more
affected by reformulation experienced faster growth in rates of child physical abuse
and neglect starting in 2011.” And he suggests the suicide rate may also have been boosted by “parental death and incarceration” associated with the shift from legally produced pharmaceuticals to illicit drugs.”
https://reason.com/2023/12/04/oxycontins-reformulation-linked-to-rising-suicides-by-children/
Want To Challenge Your Speed Camera Ticket? That’ll Be $100.
“Motorists caught speeding in Peninsula, Ohio, have options: They can pay with Visa, Mastercard, Discover, or PayPal. But if they want to dispute a ticket, the flexibility ends.
Before vehicle owners can appear in municipal court to defend themselves, they must pay a $100 “filing fee.” No exceptions. No discounts. No deferrals. It’s the cost of admission—roughly the same as a one-day ticket to Disneyland.
Many drivers skip the expense and plead guilty, which works well for Peninsula. In just the first five months after launching a handheld photo radar program in April 2023, this village south of Cleveland generated 8,900 citations and $560,000 in revenue. That’s an average of about 1,800 citations and $110,000 in revenue per month.”
https://reason.com/2023/12/05/want-to-challenge-your-speed-camera-ticket-thatll-be-100/
San Francisco’s Can-Kicking on Zoning Reform Could See It Lose All Zoning Powers
“It takes San Francisco three years on average to fully approve new housing projects, the longest of any jurisdiction in California, according to an audit published by the state Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) in October.
The very predictable result is that the Golden State’s fourth-largest city is also one of the nation’s most expensive, with median one-bedroom rents above $2,000 and a median home value of $1.4 million.
That San Francisco is expensive because it takes forever to approve new housing isn’t a new finding. Whether the city will actually get rid of the regulations gumming up home construction is now coming to a head.”
https://reason.com/2023/12/05/san-franciscos-can-kicking-on-zoning-reform-could-see-it-lose-all-zoning-powers/
Federal Shipping Regulations Sank One of America’s Biggest Offshore Wind Projects
“That Reuters report doesn’t include a specific mention of the Jones Act—the century-old law that effectively bans foreign-built ships from operating between American ports, and that subsequently drives up the cost of shipbuilding and shipping in the United States—but the subtext is pretty clear. In a call with reporters a few days after the project was canceled, Ørsted CEO Mads Nipper cited “significant delays on vessel availability” caused “a situation where we would need to go out and recontract all or very large scopes of the project at expectedly higher prices.”
That’s what the Jones Act does. As Reason has reported on many other occasions, the Jones Act is a nakedly protectionist law that severely limits competition in the American shipping market by requiring that ships operating between U.S. ports are American-built, American-crewed, and American-flagged.
Building offshore wind farms requires ships that can deliver supplies to the construction site and some specialty ships that serve as a base for building the turbines. While there are plenty of ships around the rest of the world that can do that work, companies like Ørsted can’t use those ships to build wind farms in American coastal waters.”
https://reason.com/2023/12/05/federal-shipping-regulations-sank-one-of-americas-biggest-offshore-wind-projects/