Catherine Reid-Samans

I’m worried for my country; I’m worried for our world!

[Joshua Reed Eakle 🗽 @JoshEakle]

ICE killed a father of three yesterday and no one is talking about it.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo spent 35 years in Houston building homes and raising a family.

According to people interviewed, every night after work you'd find him on his porch, listening to music, petting his dog. He helped his three kids (U.S. Citizens) get through college.

It certainly seems that he was doing everything right, and then a federal agent shot him dead during a stop and his own son found out from a Facebook video, recognizing his father's voice as he lay bleeding in the street.

His son says that if his father had recognized any sign of law enforcement, he would have complied without question.

DHS says he "tried to run him over." This is the exact same lie they used to justify murdering Renee Good, a mother of three.

We are being asked to trust a rogue, lawless agency's word over a dead man's family, again, with no body cam release and no independent investigation.

Everyone should be outraged.

[Chaya Eitan @ChayaEitan]

He co-owned Macy’s and could have kept every dollar. Instead, Nathan Straus gave two-thirds of his fortune to a country that didn't even exist yet.
​An American New Yorker, Straus visited Jerusalem in 1904, canceled the rest of his Mediterranean tour, and dedicated his life to the Land of Israel.
​He poured his wealth into:
​Soup kitchens feeding hundreds daily in the Old City.
​Health stations to fight malaria and trachoma.
​A major Jerusalem health center with a cornerstone carved in English, Hebrew, and Arabic—built "for the benefit of all inhabitants."
​In 1912, he was in Palestine with his brother Isidor. Nathan wanted to stay longer, but an impatient Isidor sailed home early on a ship called the Titanic. Isidor never made it back.
​Devastated, Nathan spent the rest of his days giving, famously saying: “Give at death, it is lead. Give in sickness, it is silver. Give in health, it is gold.”
​Today, a thriving coastal city of 250,000 people stands in Israel, built on the land he bet on decades before it was a state.
​It’s called Netanya. Named for Natan.

[Masih Alinejad @AlinejadMasih]

While the world's cameras are fixed on the five-day state funeral of Khamenei, the Islamic Republic is silently killing this 23-year-old girl with a slow death.

Raheleh Moeini, a biomedical engineering graduate of Amirkabir University, had traveled back to Iran from Italy to visit her family. On January 18th, in Saadatabad, Tehran, she was shot by security forces and at that very moment, bleeding and wounded, she was abducted and transferred to Qarchak Prison. Her family spent weeks not knowing where she was. Whether she was alive or dead.

Now Branch Tehran’s Revolutionary Court, has issued its verdict. One year for being on the street where they shot her. One and a half years for having a Twitter account. Two years banned from leaving the country. This regime first put a bullet in her, then put her on trial.

Be the voice of Raheleh Moeini.

#FreeRahelehMoeini

[Ronan Farrow @RonanFarrow]

Studies now present a striking picture of what happens when private equity firms acquire hospitals and nursing homes: predictable increases in harm and deaths. One landmark study shows: patient deaths up about 11% after such acquisitions.

[Royally Sage @sage1411]

My brother posts this every year in the family chat on the 4th. Still hilarious.

[Captain Allen @CptAllenHistory]

June 29, 1967 — America’s top generals quietly told Israel exactly which territory it needed just to survive.

In a classified memorandum to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara (JCSM-373-67), the Joint Chiefs of Staff gave their strictly military assessment of “minimum territory” Israel would require for defensible borders against conventional attack and terrorist raids.

Their conclusion was blunt: “From a strictly military point of view, Israel would require the retention of some captured territory in order to provide militarily defensible borders.”

Key recommendations included:

• The high ground running through Judea & Samaria (the “West Bank”) east of the main north-south road — giving Israel control of commanding terrain overlooking the vulnerable coastal plain and Jerusalem.

• The Golan Heights plateau to stop Syrian shelling and terrorist raids from the overlooking heights.

• The Gaza Strip — trading a long, hostile border for a much shorter, more manageable one.

• Limited areas in Sinai to protect the port of Eilat and ensure access through the Strait of Tiran.

They stressed these were purely military judgments, based on classic principles like control of high ground, natural obstacles, and defense in depth. The pre-1967 armistice lines were simply indefensible.

57 years later — after repeated wars, intifadas, the Gaza withdrawal disaster, October 7, and ongoing rocket and terror threats from every direction — those same geographic realities remain unchanged.

Defensible borders were never about conquest. They were, and still are, about survival when your neighbors openly declare they want you gone.

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

It's a new religion.

The ad hoc walk of public shame.

The declaration, voices breaking as they scream in public, that "I want you to redeem yourself."

This isn't about the real Gaza. Because to talk about the real Gaza you'd have to notice that Hamas is still holding up the Arab rebuilding, or that Iran's eliminationist war on Israel will yet drive Gaza into another war -- and Lebanon too, if Iran has its say. But these people don't believe in agency, in real people living in real places. We're all just characters in a morality play.

That's why Gaza can reorganize leftist politics even as every other priority falls by the wayside. Because this is a religion. And we are its cosmic villain.

[Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani]

I'm a cardiologist. If I could only recommend two supplements for the rest of my career, it would be these:

Magnesium glycinate.
Vitamin D3 with K2.

I take both every day. I prescribe both constantly. And the number of patients whose lives visibly change within weeks of starting them still surprises me after twenty years.
Up to 75% of Americans are low in magnesium. Most have no idea. If you're stressed, sleeping poorly, cramping at night, your blood pressure runs high, or you feel wired but exhausted — this is probably why.

Magnesium calms the nervous system, relaxes blood vessels, supports healthy heart rhythms, and improves sleep quality. The glycinate form is highly absorbable and gentle on the stomach. 300-400mg before bed. It's the supplement patients thank me for most — because they finally wake up feeling calm instead of wrecked.
Most Americans are also deficient in vitamin D. Low D3 quietly ruins your mood, weakens your immunity, increases inflammation, and raises cardiovascular risk. I see suboptimal levels constantly in my heart patients. Target blood levels of 50-80 ng/mL — not the bare minimum of 30 most doctors accept.

Here's what almost nobody knows: low D3 actively depletes magnesium. Your body uses magnesium to convert D3 into its active form. If you supplement D3 without magnesium, you can actually worsen a magnesium deficiency — and wonder why you still feel terrible.
You need both. They work as a system.

And always take D3 with K2. Without K2, calcium from D3 can deposit in your arteries instead of your bones. Together, they keep bones dense and arteries clean.
D3 with K2 in the morning with a meal containing fat — they're fat-soluble.
Magnesium glycinate at night before bed.

Cheap. Available everywhere. Backed by extensive evidence. And the combination addresses two of the most common deficiencies driving the fatigue, poor sleep, anxiety, muscle cramps, and low mood that millions of people are medicating with far more expensive and dangerous interventions.

Your future self will thank you. Probably within two weeks.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Alan Turing was 41 when he died. Two years earlier, the country he helped win the Second World War put him on trial for being gay, then gave him a choice: go to prison, or take hormone injections that would chemically castrate him. He chose the injections. And in those same final years, he was quietly working out the math behind how a tiger gets its stripes.

Start with the war. At Bletchley Park, Britain's secret codebreaking base, Turing led the team that cracked Enigma, the machine the German navy used to scramble its messages so no one else could read them. He built his own machine, the Bombe, to crack the code faster than a room full of people ever could. That work, some historians think, shortened the war by two years. It may have saved as many as 14 million lives. Then in 1950 he wrote a paper built around one question: "Can machines think?" He even laid out a way to test it. We call it the Turing test today, and every chatbot you have ever used goes back to that page.

He did all of this in secret, and the country he saved never knew. In 1952 the police found out he was gay, and back then that was a crime in Britain. He was convicted, lost his security clearance, and was put on the injections. That same year, he published a paper showing how two chemicals, spreading and reacting across a surface, can cover it in spots, stripes, and swirls all on their own. It started a whole new field: using math to explain how living things grow. A codebreaker had just handed science the rules for how nature makes its patterns.

He was still working on that puzzle when he died in 1954. He was 41. Ten more years would have taken him to 51, in 1964, right as the first working computers were being built and the field he imagined was taking off.

He never got to see any of it. The patterns he predicted on paper were not proven in a lab until 1990, 36 years after he died. It took the British government until 2009 to say sorry, and 2013 to pardon him. In 2021 his face went on the 50-pound note, with a sunflower on the back, a nod to the pattern work he never finished.

Turing asked "Can machines think?" in 1950. The field built on that question got its name, artificial intelligence, at a meeting in 1956. By then he had been dead for two years. He never heard the words. The machine he dreamed up now sits in your pocket, and it answers when you talk to it.

[medoyid_ua @LetsArmUKR]

Zelensky just laid it out plain: he handed the new Polish president the first official visit, got a Volhynia book shoved at him during the handshake like some passive-aggressive receipt, kept quiet about it for a year while Polish PMs actually showed up and Poles kept supporting Ukraine. Now that the guy is stirring domestic hate for political points, the mask drops.

This is classic Orban cosplay. Weaponize old wounds to dodge the present. Except the present is Ukrainian soldiers holding the line so Polish cities do not have to learn what Russian glide bombs sound like. We are not asking for gratitude. We are stating a fact: right now Ukraine is the only thing standing between the Russian war machine and the rest of the eastern flank. Without us bleeding every day, the cost of European security does not stay abstract. It lands on Warsaw, Vilnius, Tallinn, and Berlin in very concrete, expensive, bloody ways.

Naming a brigade after Ukrainian historical figures is not a diplomatic insult. It is an army at war choosing its own symbols of resistance against the same imperial project that has tried to erase us for centuries. Zelensky signed it because that is what a commander-in-chief does when his soldiers say these names motivate them to close with the enemy. Poland demanding cancellation of a Ukrainian decree on Ukrainian territory is not partnership. It is trying to run our internal morale from abroad while our people die protecting yours.

History is not forgotten. Volhynia, Katyn, Sahryn, Pavlokoma, none of it. But turning every conversation into competitive victimhood while Russian forces sit 400 kilometers from your border is suicidal theater. The Kremlin laughs at it. Every time a NATO-adjacent politician picks 1940s grudges over 2025 realities, Moscow gets another free information op.

Ukraine will keep defending Polish security interests on the battlefield whether Warsaw likes our choice of heroes or not. That is not arrogance. That is arithmetic. We have already paid the butcher's bill for the continent's complacency. The bill only gets bigger if we lose.

Poles who actually grasp this keep supporting us. The ones playing domestic culture war with Ukrainian blood are choosing the cheap applause over strategic survival. History shows that choice ends badly, usually with Russian tanks in the suburbs. We have seen the movie. We are living the sequel so you do not have to.

The faster Europe drops the historical one-upmanship and treats Ukraine as the forward defense line it already is, the cheaper this whole nightmare stays for everyone behind us. Anything else is just expensive nostalgia paid for in Ukrainian lives.

[Kosher @koshercockney]

I always feel it’s important to remind people of this extremely powerful photograph.

Women marching against the mandatory hijab law imposed by the Islamic Republic takeover in Iran, 1979.

These women deserve better.

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

The Lessons I Learned from My Dad

I am not the man my father is.
I am trying. Some days closer. Some days farther.
He never sat me down and explained these lessons. He lived them. I’m still learning them.

Show up.
The kitchen table. The hospital room. The funeral. The picket line. The call from the son who won’t answer.
Show up.
Most days that’s the whole job.
My whole life I watched him do it. Not for cameras. Not for headlines. Not because there was something in it for him. He showed up because someone needed him.

I learned that grief doesn’t make you special.
My father buried a wife and daughter. He buried a son. Yet he never treated grief as a claim on other people’s sympathy. Instead, it made him notice theirs.
A mother who lost a child. A father sitting beside a hospital bed. A kid scared about what comes next. A son who lost his mother, his sister, his brother.
He always noticed.

I learned that power is not the point.
The people who chase power eventually confuse the office with themselves.
My father never did.
Whether he was a county councilman, a senator, vice president, or president, he was the same man.
The title changed.
He didn’t.

I learned that family comes first.
The train from Wilmington wasn’t symbolism.
It was every night.
He read to us. Showed up to games. Sat through hospital rooms. Waited up for children who were lost.
And when the day came that the country and the family could not both have him at full strength, he chose family. He relinquished the last chapter of how he wanted to be remembered. And he never complained about it.

Most of all, I learned that love is not soft.
Love is discipline.
Love is showing up at one in the morning when nobody is watching.
Love is answering the phone.
Love is staying.
Love is getting back up after life knocks you down and doing it all again tomorrow.
That love saved my life.
I’ve failed at many of these lessons, sometimes in very public ways.
He loved me anyway.

That’s the last lesson.
I am not trying to become my father.
I am trying to carry what he gave me.
And if I can do that, even imperfectly, that will be enough.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad. I love you.

[Dylan O'Sullivan @DylanoA4]

How does C. S. Lewis do that, every paragraph is a book

[Cochav Elkayam-Levy @CochavElkayam]

The silence is broken.

“Silenced No More” — the groundbreaking 298-page report exposing Hamas’s systematic sexual terror, rape, torture & mutilation on October 7 and against hostages.

Must-read in @Jerusalem_Post Magazine 👇

https://t.co/YQYxknt1uZ

#SilencedNoMore #October7 #Hamas #Israel #SexualViolence

[Patrick Skinner @SkinnerPm]

I have few friends. Ben Taub is one of them. His work is always urgent but timeless. The depth of research and the writing is why he won the Pulitzer Prize. Read this latest piece by him to see how serious all the insane stuff from this criminal admin we mock actually is.

[ד״ר עינת וילף Dr. Einat Wilf @EinatWilf]

Oxford debate is done! Kudos to the amazing team of @emilykschrader @HenMazzig @AviMayer
More impressions later, but for now - here is the text of my talk in opposition to the proposition "This House Believes Israel Never Truly Wanted Peace with Palestine":

Israel wanted peace. Truly. Repeatedly.

And yet, from the minute the United Nations voted for the Partition Plan in 1947, we have been under attack. The Arabs threatened to use force to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state on any part of our homeland, and they proceeded to make good on that threat.

And what did that Partition Plan call for anyway? Was it some grave injustice to the Arabs? No. Most of the fertile land was to go to what would have become the Palestinian Arab state, while the Jewish state would be relegated to three pieces of barely contiguous, mostly arid non-arable territory.

And yet, the Jews said yes. But the Arabs said no. First the Palestinian Arab militias attacked and then in May 1948, every Arab nation surrounding us and beyond invaded. And this is the only reason why there were ever any refugees from that war. The only reason.

Israel managed to survive the 1948 Arab war, and we would have been happy to just live in peace.

Remember, at the end of the 1948 war, Jordan annexed the West Bank and Egypt administered Gaza. There was nothing – absolutely nothing - to prevent them from creating one more Arab state on these territories for the Palestinians.
They did not.

Instead, they chose to continue the war against Israel, which is how Israel came to control the West Bank and Gaza. It was not in some aggressive land grab. It was after multiple Arab armies surrounded us - again - and in May 1967, announced: “This is our chance Arabs, to deal Israel a mortal blow of annihilation . . .”

Israel won that war in six days, but even then, we offered peace, making it, as Abba Eban (of Cambridge, much better I believe, I went there too…) wryly observed “the first war in history that on the morrow the victors sued for peace and the vanquished called for unconditional surrender."

And, what was the Arab and Palestinian response to Israel offering peace? "No to peace with Israel, no to recognition of Israel, no to negotiations".

But we still hoped for peace. So, we entered the Oslo Peace process in 1993. And in September 2000, just when many Israelis, including me, truly believed that a two-state solution was close, Palestinians launched the Second Intifada escalating into a brutal campaign of suicide bombings that left over 1000 Israelis shred to bloody pieces with thousands more maimed for life.

Yet, through all that, when in December 2000, President Bill Clinton put a peace deal on the table that would have given the Palestinians all of Gaza, 96% of the West Bank with comparable land swaps from within Israel, no settlements, safe passage between the two territories, most of the Old City, Arab East Jerusalem for a capital and an international force replacing the IDF on the West Bank - it was Israel that said yes.

There was no excuse for the Palestinians not to take this deal. None. But the Palestinians, led by Yasser Arafat, walked away, choosing instead to continue blowing us up through suicide bombings.

Ultimately this led to the construction of the security barrier, checkpoints, roadblocks in the West Bank which thankfully brought, for a while, an end to this reign of bloody terror.

You would think we would get the message, but in 2008 it was Israel, through Prime Minister Olmert, who made yet another peace offer, A near-total Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, with close to 100% land swaps; No settlements, A link to the Gaza Strip; Arab East Jerusalem as capital of Palestine. Israel would have given up sovereignty over all of the Old City – including the single holiest site to the Jewish people, The Temple Mount, which would be overseen by an international trusteeship.

Again, there was no excuse for the Palestinians not to accept it. None. But under President Abbas, the Palestinians walked away from that, too.

Israel even disengaged from Gaza in 2005, removing all settlements, allowing ourselves to believe that the elected government of Hamas wanted to focus on improving their people’s lives, instead of destroying ours.

We were so desperate to believe this that we ignored all the red flags, allowing numerous Gazans to enter Israel to work, study and get specialized medical care.

But all this emphasis on economic development and work permits was part of a carefully built deception, as Hamas leaders later boasted, to lull Israelis into thinking they really were going to mind their own business and live calmly next to us – while they were planning something very very different.

On Oct 7, 2023 3000 trained and armed Palestinians invaded Israel from Gaza. Much of the intelligence they relied on came from the very Palestinians we allowed into Israel on work and study and medical permits. They massacred. They pillaged. They engaged in acts of gleeful sadistic brutality which I still lack the heart or the stomach to describe. They took 251 hostages – elderly men and women, mothers, fathers, children, babies. And it was not just trained militants, thousands of so-called “Ordinary ‘innocent’ civilian Palestinians” joined enthusiastically in the frenzy of manic violence, committing horrific acts of brutality.

And when the IDF went into Gaza, as they had to, to ensure that the Palestinians could never again do this to us, they found a completely weaponized landscape: Tunnels running under and opening into every house, mosque, hospital, and school. A land filled with booby traps making it impossible for us to fight without doing enormous damage to Gaza. And Hamas, who remained hidden in tunnels and in civilian clothing, designed it this way. This is what we were facing.

So do not dare look at us and propose that “Israel Never Truly Wanted Peace with Palestine”. If anything, we wanted it too much. We made offer after offer of peace. We absorbed endless aggression.

But we are not going to let ourselves be annihilated to convince you that we want peace. And we will certainly not accept peace on any terms. Some of you demand a one state solution and pretend that two peoples, connected to the same land but with distinct religions, values, cultures, languages and histories, who have never lived in peace, will magically exist in peace and harmony if only they live in one state. And frankly, far too often this call for a one state solution is not naive or delusional but a carefully calculated attempt to rob Jews of their right to self-determination to be a free people in our own land.

In this, we are no fools. We have a millennia long history of being persecuted and subjugated by one people after another, and we are not about to give up our one and only state to go back to being at the mercy of others.

We do want peace and we are willing to go far to make it happen, but we will not give up our state for it.

So now, it is your turn, Palestinians, to answer the question that somehow no university seems to debate – When did you ever truly want peace with the one Jewish state?