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Ruth King

EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Qatar shaping anti-Israeli curricula for 8,000 American schools in all 50 states

By on March 17th, 2025

https://worldisraelnews.com/qatar-influence-rewriting-us-school-curricula-to-promote-anti-israel-narrative/

Pro-Hamas, Iranian-aligned Gulf state using its petro dollars to shape the curriculum used by thousands of American K-12 schools in all 50 states, report warns.  

The Qatari government is using its funding of an American college where the curriculum for thousands of American K-12 schools is drafted to reshape the way school children in the U.S. are taught, injecting anti-Israel bias into primary and secondary school education, a recently published report warns.

Last week, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) published a report documenting the Qatari government’s extensive foreign influence and anti-Israel bias infiltrating U.S. K-12 classrooms through Brown University’s Choices Program.

This curriculum, used by over 8,000 schools across all 50 states and reaching more than one million students, operates with undisclosed foreign funding and has been found to systematically distort historical facts to delegitimize Israel.

The report also raises significant concerns about transparency, oversight, and compliance with federal disclosure laws.

According to the ISGAP report, Qatari funding has led to a systematic manipulation of educational materials used by the Choices Program within the same units over the last decade, gradually shifting its curriculum to present an increasingly anti-Israel perspective.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

More UN lies about Israel A new UN report on Israel’s ‘gender-based violence’ against Palestinians is full of hogwash. Brendan O’Neill

By on March 17th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/16/more-un-lies-about-israel/

The United Nations is hardly known for fair or cool commentary on Israel. But its latest report really takes the biscuit. It comes from its Human Rights Council. It is titled ‘More Than a Human Can Bear’. It is a breathless account of all the ‘gender-based violence’ Israel has apparently visited on Gaza since the start of the Israel-Hamas War. ‘Gender persecution’ and ‘sexual violence’ have been rife courtesy of those monsters in the Israel Defence Forces, the report says. Guess what? It’s hogwash. This is without question one of the most dishonest official documents I have ever read.

The report made waves in the global media this week. And in the Israelophobic cesspit of social media, where there’s a voracious appetite for tales of Israeli evil. ‘UN experts accuse Israel of sexual violence and “genocidal acts” in Gaza’, said a BBC headline. The Washington Post wrung its hands over Israel’s use of ‘sexual humiliation’ as a weapon of war. These people should have read the report. They’d have discovered that many of the things these ‘experts’ refer to as ‘sexual humiliation’ and ‘gender-based violence’ are in fact normal wartime events, common to virtually every conflict in history.

Consider the report’s analysis of the IDF’s treatment of ‘men and boys’ in Gaza. There’s a whole chapter on ‘sexual violence against men and boys’. Apparently, men and boys were frequently ‘subjected to acts of a sexual nature’. It sounds awful, until you realise that the ‘experts’ include within this definition such run-of-the-mill activities as searching fighting-age males for weapons. The IDF, conscious that suicide bombings are a favoured military tactic of Hamas, sometimes requires arrested men to undress to their underwear. And the report refers to this as ‘forced public stripping’, violence with ‘sexual characteristics’. There’s no other way to put it: this is insane.

The idea that the IDF gets a kick from compelling fighting-age males to undress is at best misinformation, and at worst yet another defamation against the Jewish State, which is always seen as having uniquely nefarious motives. The report laments the ‘forced public nudity’ experienced by ‘men and boys’ in Gaza, as if the IDF were a gang of porn-sick voyeurs. Making fighting-age men remove their outer clothing is not ‘sexual violence’, you loons – it’s a means for the IDF to search for suicide belts. Hundreds of Israelis have been butchered by Hamas ‘men and boys’ wearing bombs under their shirts. To demonise Israel’s hunt for such weaponry as a perversion, as the sick thrill of ‘forced nudity’, is bad faith on steroids.

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EDUCATION, MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald Racist—But Underfunded? Universities have gone from arguing that science is biased to claiming that even the overhead on their massive federal research budgets must not be cut.

By on March 17th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/nih-university-funding-research-budgets-indirect-costs

It seems like just yesterday that medical institutions were touting their antiracism efforts. In October 2020, the American Association of Medical Colleges published “Framework for Addressing and Eliminating Racism at the AAMC, in Academic Medicine, and Beyond.” The publication calls for “individual self-reflection on systemic racism,” “anti-racism efforts within the AAMC,” “anti-racism efforts within the academic medical community,” and “anti-racism efforts within the broader community.” In 2021, the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA launched an initiative called “Anti-Racist Transformation in Medical Education.” The initiative aims to “mitigate racism in the learning and work environment of medical schools through a formal management change process.” In January 2023, an antiracism committee at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine offered a Facing Microaggressions in the Workplace training, part of the school’s Action for Cultural Transformation. ACT aims to eliminate “structural injustice across Penn Medicine”; it is overseen by the medical school’s vice chairs for Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity.

Now the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California, and the AAMC are telling a different tale about science and medicine. These fields are unqualified civilizational triumphs, they say, jeopardized not by racism but by MAGA ignorance. What changed?

On February 7, 2025, the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s biggest funder of biomedical research, declared that henceforth it was limiting the amount that it would pay universities for the indirect costs of NIH-funded science. Indirect costs (also known as overhead, or facilities & administration) might include the salaries of administrators across the university, campus-wide building and equipment maintenance and depreciation, utilities across the university, janitorial services, and general office equipment. Direct costs, by contrast, are grant-specific, covering particular researchers’ salaries, lab materials, animal specimens, cell lines, and the like.

Previously, the NIH was adding up to 69 percent of a research grant to cover the facilities & administration infrastructure that allegedly undergirded subsidized research. For every dollar that a university received to support a particular project, NIH would throw in as much as an additional 69 cents for indirect costs, say, bringing the total amount of the grant to $1.69. The NIH negotiated indirect cost rates individually for each university in a complex, resource-consumptive process; after a university’s rate was determined, that rate applied for the next three to four years to every NIH research grant that that particular university might receive, as well as to grants from other federal agencies.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

What Are the Left’s Solutions for the Problems They Created? The U.S. faces mounting trade deficits, immigration crises, and endless foreign wars, while critics of Trump’s policies offer no viable alternatives to Biden-era failures. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on March 17th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/17/what-are-the-lefts-solutions-for-the-problems-they-created/

The Wall Street Journal has consistently criticized Trump’s economic policies, particularly his ongoing “trade war” with Canada, over the past several weeks. And certainly, the tensions are regrettable. Trump’s trolling of the insufferable Justin Trudeau, with talk of Canada becoming the “51st state,” perhaps only galvanized the Canadian left. It unfortunately may ensure that the only real hope for a Canadian return to normality, the election of Pierre Poilievre, may be lost.

That said, does the WSJ truly believe that the current $1.7 trillion budget deficit stacked on top of $36 trillion in national debt and an annual $1 trillion trade deficit are sustainable in any fashion? Do they believe any Republican president would have survived the midterms if he cut or “reformed” Social Security? If so, consult the fate of the recommendations of left-wing Barack Obama’s 2010 Simpson-Bowles commission (“The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform”).

DOGE, the effort to demand either symmetrical or no tariffs, closing the border, the rare minerals agreement, etc., are all controversial, even desperate efforts to stave off insolvency.

NAFTA was sold on the promise of trade equilibriums, eventually leading to no tariffs and rough parity. Yet Canada currently runs a $60 billion surplus largely because of its energy sales and selective tariffs on U.S. agriculture and some manufactured goods. That sum might be tolerable from a friend and not worth the acrimony, even with the present massive trade and budget deficits—if it had occurred in isolation.

But it did not. The Canadian surplus is force multiplied by its chronic refusal to spend a measly 2 percent of its GDP on defense. Canada could have easily offered a partnership with the U.S. to explore joint missile defense or shared Arctic Ocean naval patrols with a new fleet of Canadian and American icebreakers.

But it did nothing of the sort.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hamas-Linked CAIR Got Over $7,200,000 in Taxpayer Money And here’s the big surprise: that money is unaccounted for. by Robert Spencer

By on March 17th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/hamas-linked-cair-got-over-7200000-in-taxpayer-money/

Nihad Awad, the cofounder and longtime executive director of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), has plenty of reasons to be happy. He notoriously said that the October 7 jihad massacre of 1,200 Israelis made him “happy,” and now it has been revealed that he has over seven million other reasons for a smile to break out on his taciturn, creepy face: that’s the amount of taxpayer funds his sinister organization has received, despite its links to one of the most evil groups on the planet.

The New York Post reported the appalling news on Friday: “According to the Intelligent Advocacy Network (IAN), a California-based, non-partisan advocacy group, the money was given to the chapter to help re-settle impoverished immigrants in California between 2022 and 2024.”

The “chapter” that the Post mentions is CAIR’s Los Angeles chapter, which appears to have gotten hold of the money in some irregular way: “In what appears to be a sleight of hand, the money – $7,217,968.44 — was sent to CAIR-Greater Los Angeles and not to CAIR-CA, which was the only group eligible to receive it, according to the complaint” that IAN has sent to the Justice Department.

The Post explains that “the Greater Los Angeles chapter of the Muslim organization, which is not a registered non-profit and not eligible to handle charitable donations, received the entire pot of money according to the complaint, viewed by The Post.” The complaint stated: “These sub grants from CAIR-CA to CAIR chapters raise serious legal concerns about whether CAIR simply shifted more money to itself.”

The fact that CAIR-Greater Los Angeles got the money instead of CAIR-CA is actually only a small part of the problem. Why is CAIR getting any money to resettle “impoverished immigrants in California” at all? CAIR claims to be “America’s largest Muslim civil rights organization.” It adds, improbably, that it works to “protect civil rights, enhance understanding of Islam, promote justice, and empower American Muslims.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Dems Cheered Obama’s DOGE-Like Initiative, But Cry ‘Fascism’ When Trump Does the Same Sarah Arnold (includes Obama Video)

By on March 17th, 2025

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/saraharnold/2025/03/16/obama-tried-doge-n2653882

A resurfaced 2011 video reveals former President Barack Obama launching a “Campaign to Cut Waste,” strikingly similar to the current Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative to eliminate government inefficiency. In the video, Obama emphasizes the need to reduce wasteful spending, highlighting the appointment of former President Joe Biden to lead the effort, saying that “nobody messes with Joe.” This initiative aimed to increase government accountability, reduce unnecessary costs, and promote fiscal responsibility echoes what the Trump administration is currently trying to do.

Elon Musk recently shared a 2011 video featuring Obama promoting his initiative, “Campaign to Cut Waste,” which closely resembles the efforts Musk’s DOGE program is currently undertaking. In the video, Obama highlights his efforts to eliminate government waste, pointing out unnecessary federal programs and absurd taxpayer-funded projects, such as an online fan page for a folk music group composed of Forest Rangers.

“Everyone knows that getting rid of the deficit requires some tough decision. And that includes cutting back on billions of dollars in programs that a lot of people care about. But what should be easy is getting rid of the pointless waste and stupid spending that doesn’t benefit anybody,” Obama said in the resurfaced video.

“Obama sounds exactly like DOGE!!” Musk wrote on X. 

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Zeynep Tufekci We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

By on March 17th, 2025

https://archive.is/CQzbl#selection-723.0-731.59

Since scientists first began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology — research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world — no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So, the Wuhan research was totally safe and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission: It certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratory’s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions may have been terrifyingly lax.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

The Moral Hazard Of Illegal Immigration

By on March 17th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/03/17/the-moral-hazard-of-illegal-immigration/

The U.S. border was illicitly crossed fewer times last month than in any February in the country’s history. There were 28,654 encounters and apprehensions of illegals reported nationwide. For those who might see border security, and deportations, as cruel acts against the poor and hopeless who want only to escape to a land of plenty, we offer another way of looking at illegal immigration.

Because the February number is actually good news.

The phrase “moral hazard” comes to us from the insurance industry. It refers, says Law & Liberty, “to the possibility that insuring against costly outcomes actually increases the reckless behavior creating the need for insurance in the first place.”

We often hear about the moral hazard of foreign aid. As long as we send money to struggling nations, their “leaders” will never liberalize their economies and root out the corruption that wrecks their societies. They don’t have to deal with the consequences of their policies.

It takes no leap of logic to apply the tag to an open-border policy, much like the one the Biden administration oversaw for four years. When unfettered entry into the U.S. is a pressure release valve for countries where millions are mired in perpetual poverty, those nations’ leaders, who are more often than not grifters and authoritarians, have no incentive to free their economies and purge their governments of the mobsters and entrenched insiders whose misfeasance limits prosperity to only a select few.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

POSITIVE NEWS FROM ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

By on March 16th, 2025

POSITIVE NEWS IN A WAR
 
Ex-hostages give Purim gifts to cancer children. Heroic former hostages Agam Berger, Daniella Gilboa, and Naama Levy joined Rabbi Asher Levi to bring joy to cancer patients at Schneider Children’s Medical Center, delivering Purim gifts and sharing a powerful message: “Giving to others gives us strength.”
https://unitedwithisrael.org/watch-released-female-hostages-give-out-purim-gifts-to-children-battling-cancer/
 
130-year-old violin given to ex-hostage. Tzachi Beck refurbished and gifted a 130-year-old Czechian violin d to freed hostage Agam Berger.  Agam played Amir Benayoun’s “You overcame everything with me.” breathing new life into its strings, decades after its original owner, an orchestral violinist, perished in the Holocaust. 
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-845407
 
Hostage’s grape juice lasted 5 months. Released hostage Omer Shem-Tov told of a miracle he experienced in captivity. “For five months, I had half a bottle of grape juice that I used for Kiddush. The bottle never ran out, and the juice never spoiled. It showed me how good God is and how He was with me.”
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/405094
 
Turning a Kibbutz green. Residents of Kibbutz Be’eri live on dry, arid land in Kibbutz Hatzerim while Be’eri is being rebuilt. 2,700 Birthright Israel volunteers in 100 groups will create 300 gardens – one for each Be’eri family and the surrounding areas. They will feature 1,500 trees, 41,000 herb plants, and thousands of flowers.
https://www.jns.org/wire/birthright-israel-launches-major-greening-initiative-for-hard-hit-kibbutz-beeri/
 
Sunshine volunteers. A group of volunteers ages 55 and older recently participated in Jewish National Fund-USA’s inaugural Sunshine Volunteer Mission to Israel. They spent five days restoring Israeli communities destroyed on Oct 7 2023, fixed schools and playgrounds, helped farmers, prepared food for the IDF and more.
https://www.jns.org/wire/jewish-volunteers-ages-55-plus-leave-lasting-impact-on-mission-to-israel/
 
Let’s get to work. Ex-hostage Gadi Mozes has called on his fellow Kibbutz Nir Oz members to rebuild their destroyed kibbutz and help return it to its former glory. Mozes (80) has decided “to buckle down, to roll up my sleeves and to join all those who want our home, Nir Oz, to return to being a warm and vibrant home.”
https://www.timesofisrael.com/lets-get-to-work-ex-hostage-gadi-mozes-calls-on-nir-oz-members-to-rebuild/
 
Strawberry fields forever. Uri Patkin owns the strawberry farm Uri Tutim in Moshav Yesha near the Gaza border. Yesha’s emergency squad bravely fought off terrorists on Oct 7 2023, at a heavy price. Now Uri is once again farming his high-quality, long shelf-life, hanging strawberries.
https://www.israel21c.org/strawberries-bloom-once-again-near-the-gaza-border/  https://uritutim.co.il/
 
An IDF rescue from Gaza. Israeli hostage Andrey Koslov revealed details of the daring IDF rescue of him and three other hostages from captivity in Gaza on Jun 8 2024.
https://worldisraelnews.com/watch-freed-hostage-andrey-koslov-reveals-details-of-incredible-hostage-rescue/
 
 
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Gene deletion shrinks cancer cells. Researchers from Tel Aviv University (Dan Peer’s lab) utilized CRISPR to cut the SOX2 gene from cancer cells of head and neck tumors – and in lab tests successfully eliminated 50% of the tumors. The breakthrough defied general belief that knocking out a single gene wouldn’t have any effect.
https://english.tau.ac.il/research/crispr-cancer-removal
https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/article-845688
 
Blood test to detect cancer. Israel’s OncoRedox is developing a new platform for the early diagnosis and monitoring of cancer and chronic diseases. Its disposable sensor plus AI-powered technology is designed to detect and profile cell-free metabolites within minutes, providing a unique metabolic fingerprinting.
https://www.peregrinevc.com/portfolio/oncoredox/  https://www.peregrinevc.com/portfolio/
 
Developing immunity against cancer. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Purple Biotech (see here previously) has partnered with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai New York, to develop CAPTN-3, a platform of activated antibodies. The aim is to enhance tumor-specific immunity against various cancer types.
https://purple-biotech.com/press-viewer/?i=142208
 
No more injections. Researchers at Israel’s Technion Institute have discovered that a protein in breast milk facilitates the passage of nanoparticles through the intestinal wall, delivering essential nutrients to the baby. Mimicking this mechanism, can protect medications from the digestive system and allow non-needle delivery.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/breast-milk-proteins-superpowers-lead-to-breakthrough-for-new-class-of-oral-drugs/  https://www.ynetnews.com/health_science/article/b1dzwouqyg
 
Brain study can transform speech to text technology. (TY TPS) An Israeli-led research team has analyzed how the brain processes speech and transforms sounds into conversation. It could lead to new advancements in speech recognition technology, tools for people with speech disorders, and personalized assistive devices.
https://worldisraelnews.com/speech-to-text-tech-could-be-transformed-by-new-israeli-brain-mapping-study/
 
Anti-virus nasal spray for the US. Israel’s Enovid (see here previously) has now launched its SaNOtize Nitric Oxide Nasal Spray as NOWONDER in the US. NOWONDER delivers advanced nasal cleansing, viral protection (e.g. against COVID-19), and sinus health support.
https://www.openpr.com/news/3895202/sanotize-launches-nowonder-nasal-spray-in-the-u-s
 
260 doctors attend MedEx in New Jersey. Over 500 Jewish doctors and healthcare professionals, including 260 doctors, gathered at the 10th annual MedEx event in Teaneck, New Jersey. The International Medical Aliyah Program (IMAP) started MedEx to bring 2,000 Jewish doctors to Israel. In 2024 alone it brought 519.

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OPINION Comments turned off

NO POSTINGS UNTIL MONDAY MARCH 17TH

By on March 13th, 2025

FAMILY REUNION

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