Crooked Media - What A Day: A knock at the corridor

As the death toll in Gaza has now surpassed 11,000, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, the Israeli government has faced a growing chorus of calls from the G7, the United Nations, global aid organizations and most recently French President Emmanual Macron, for restraint in its month-long campaign of airstrikes and ground fighting. 
 

• The director of Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza, Mohammad Abu Selmeyah, said that at least 25 people were killed in airstrikes on the Al-Buraq school in Gaza City, which was being used as a shelter for people whose homes had been destroyed. Doctors at Al-Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital, told the Washington Post that projectiles are landing at the hospital complex daily as Israeli ground forces encircle the Gaza City neighborhood where it is located. 
   

• Several other Gaza City hospitals have also reported taking damage in the fighting, further imperiling patients whom doctors say they are already struggling to care for amid dwindling electricity, water, and medical supplies. An explosive projectile also set fire to the Nasser Rantissi pediatric cancer hospital, Gaza health officials said. The director general of the World Health Organization said that the U.N. has verified more than 250 attacks on healthcare facilities in Gaza and the West Bank, including hospitals, clinics, and ambulances. Five hospitals have been hit in the past week alone.
   

• Israeli government spokesperson Eylon Levy claimed that a Hamas headquarters was hidden underneath the Al-Shifa hospital, implying that it should lose its protected status and is a legitimate target. Hamas denies Israeli claims that it hides weapons in tunnels under hospitals. Israeli tanks have also taken positions around the Al-Nasser, the Al-Rantisi, Children’s and Eye hospitals, and the Al-Quds hospital, according to medical staff. More than 1,000 officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) signed an open letter to President Joe Biden urging his administration to call for an immediate ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

• Secretary of State Antony Blinken made his most assertive comments to date regarding the plight of civilians in Gaza on Friday, saying, “Far too many Palestinians have been killed; far too many have suffered these past weeks.” Blinken seemed to welcome the partial humanitarian pauses that began this week. Under an agreement with the U.S., Israeli forces have paused fighting for four hours each day, though this is limited to only certain sections of northern Gaza. Blinken said that additional steps must be taken to protect Gaza’s civilians.

• Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lior Haiat told the Times of Israel that the government has revised the death toll of the October 7 Hamas attacks to 1,200, down from the previously-reported toll of 1,400. Though Haiat did not explain the updated figure, Israeli officials have said that they are still working to identify the bodies left by the attack, which also includes an unknown number of Hamas militants.

The United Nations announced on Friday that its staff around the world will observe a moment of silence on Monday to mourn the more than 100 UNRWA staff confirmed killed in Gaza, the highest death toll of U.N. workers in any modern conflict.

Exciting news for Worldos everywhere! We’re thrilled to announce that we’re rolling out extended episodes of Pod Save the World, now ad-free exclusively for our Friends of the Pod Subscribers. Not only are we ditching interruptions, we’re adding a new bi-weekly bonus segment where Tommy and Ben dive deeper into the topics that matter most to you, by answering subscriber-submitted questions straight from our Friends of the Pod Discord community. To enjoy the ad-free Pod Save the World experience and the exclusive Q&A segment, join us today at Crooked.com/friends.

(Content warning: discussion of child sexual abuse.)

In 2022, the Associated Press first reported that Paul Douglas Adams, who was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the Mormon church—had confessed to his bishop that he had been sexually abusing his daughter, who was then just five years old. The bishop with whom Adams spoke followed church policy and called what church officials refer to as the “helpline” for guidance. Lawyers for the church who staff the helpline told the bishop not to call the police or child welfare. And the bishop didn’t, despite his professional occupation as a family physician (another Mandatory Reporting profession). That was some seven years before Adams was apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security in 2017, after authorities were able to trace the videos he recorded and uploaded of himself raping two of his daughters. 

Arizona, like many other states, requires clergy, physicians, nurses, anyone who reasonably believes a child has been abused, to report the abuse. But an Arizona judge dismissed the high-profile lawsuit against the LDS Church, ruling that the bishops and other church officials who knew of the abuse were protected by clergy-penitent privilege. The church’s decision not to report allowed Adams to continue abusing his first daughter for seven years, then a second daughter, beginning when she was only 6 weeks old. The attorney representing the Adams children, Lynne Cadigan, said she will appeal the ruling, adding that if it is allowed to stand, it will “completely eviscerate the state’s child protection law.” Cadigan argued that the church interpreted clergy-penitent privilege more broadly than the state law intended in the Adams case. In the judge’s ruling, the law applies to others in the church who learned of Adams’s confession, including the disciplinary council that oversaw his eventual excommunication. That, Cadigan argued, is indecent. She lamented, “How do you explain to young victims that a rapist’s religious beliefs are more important than their right to be free from rape?”

A Reuters investigation found 600 previously-unreported workplace injuries at Elon Musk’s SpaceX, including crushed limbs, amputations, head and eye wounds, and even one death. Billionaires trying to colonize space are not, it turns out, overly concerned with OSHA regulations.

Swagger alert! FBI agents seized phones and an iPad from New York City Mayor Eric Adams as part of an investigation into his campaign fundraising. Surely this is the first step on his road to national political office, as so many in the press predicted!

Columbia University suspended its chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice For Peace on Friday, cutting off the groups’ funding and ability to hold on-campus events through the end of the term, after the two organizations organized an “unauthorized” walk out on Thursday in protest of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war and calling for an immediate ceasefire. 

House Republicans tried to use a financial services spending bill to curb abortion services and contraception access. After a string of high-profile losses directly tied to abortion, Republican members of Congress in competitive districts, fearing for their own seats, would not support the measure. 

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is under mounting pressure to fire one of his most senior ministers, Suella Braverman, after she published a controversial article in the Times of London attacking the police’s supposedly “gentle” handling of a planned pro-Palestinian march. Braverman has repeatedly criticized pro-Palestinian protestors who have amassed in London in the past month.

Joe Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill has finally begun to take the form of action, and infrastructure czar Mitch Landrieu tells Reuters that he expects the forty thousand projects to take between three and five years to be completed. “Some will get done really soon, some like the Hudson River Tunnel (for New York and New Jersey) will take a long time,” Landrieu said, “Our task is to make sure they remain on budget." The hugely ambitious program was one of Biden’s first orders of business when he took office in 2021; after its passage last year, the administration’s hope is that the projects will serve as a regular reminder of his accomplishments and fuel his reelection campaign. The projects span all fifty states and the District of Columbia; among them are bridge repairs, airport upkeep, Amtrak funding, and clean energy facilities, among many, many others. Biden has announced $614 billion of the bill’s funds and allocated $392.2 billion according to an interactive map of the projects maintained by the White House. The most expensive project announced so far is more than $3 billion for a sweeping internet access program called BEAD. Expanding Amtrak access is another high priority, as is investment in Ohio’s Brent Spence bridge, which Biden mentioned during his State of the Union address.

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Surgeons at NYU Langone Health in New York City performed the first successful eye transplant.

Germany’s parliament approved a global minimum corporate tax of 15 percent on Friday, a major step in the fight against corporate tax evasion.