How Would a Humanitarian Pause Work in Gaza? | Can Happiness Be Taught? | People v. Cancer 2023 Summit - The Atlantic | Plant Seeds Are Stuck

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� � � � � � You Might Like � � � � � � � � � How Would a Humanitarian Pause Work in Gaza? - The New Yorker    As the war in Gaza completes its fifth week, the death toll suffered by Palestinian civilians has left behind all precedent in the grim conflict between Israel and Hamas. The daily images from Gaza of flattened blocks, sheared-off apartment buildings, and rescue workers searching through mounds of rubble for survivors evoke scenes from Mosul in 2017, after the heavy U.S.-led bombing campaign there against ISIS. Since Israel counterattacked Hamas after the atrocities of October 7th, more than four thousand children have died in Gaza, according to the Hamas-controlled health ministry. That figure is more than three times all of the combat-related child deaths in Gaza recorded by the U.N. since 2008, when it started keeping count. (The U.N. has not verified the casualty figures released by Gaza’s health ministry, but in the past, a UNICEF spokesman told the Guardian, the ministry’s figures have generally held up under review.) Doctors in Gaza’s hospitals supported by the International Committee of the Red Cross “have never seen this level of mass casualties,” Robert Mardini, the I.C.R.C.’s director-general, told me. An estimated two-thirds of Gaza’s population of more than two million people have been displaced from their homes. “No place is spared by the hostilities,” Mardini said. On Friday, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, rejected calls for even a temporary ceasefire until Hamas and its allies return the more than two hundred and thirty hostages, many of them civilians, whom the militants seized in the October 7th attacks. Gilad Erdan, Israel’s Ambassador to the U.N., told CNN that no humanitarian break in combat was necessary, because Israel had allowed “the number of trucks entering Gaza now with food and medicines to reach almost a hundred trucks every day.” (Prior to October 7th, about five hundred trucks carried supplies to Gaza daily. On Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the current rate of supply to Gaza is “good, but it’s grossly insufficient.”) Erdan also said that “we shouldn’t believe or take any numbers coming out of Gaza at face value,” because “everything is being controlled by the terrorists of Hamas.” At one point during the interview, the Ambassador said, “There is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza.” The Biden Administration seeks to shake up this dismal status quo by developing what the President and Blinken call a “humanitarian pause,” a vague, technocratic term apparently chosen to avoid “ceasefire,” the word mounted on posters by antiwar and pro-Palestinian protesters worldwide. A “humanitarian ceasefire” is also the goal enunciated by António Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Blinken hopped last week from Jerusalem to Amman to Ramallah to Baghdad to Ankara, trying to advance Washington’s ideas about a pause or pauses. On Monday, speaking to ABC News, Netanyahu mentioned what he might accept: “Tactical little pauses—an hour here, an hour there.” Blinken, speaking to reporters during his travels, explained the nub of the challenge in his diplomacy: “Israel has raised important questions about how humanitarian pauses would work. We’ve got to answer those questions.” He said that “teams” of U.S. and Israeli officials were now addressing the matter. Continued here Can Happiness Be Taught? - The New Yorker    Staring into the mirror, on a Tuesday morning, you decide that your self needs all the help it can get. But where to turn? You were reading James Clear’s “Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones” and doing well until you spilled half a bottle of Knob Creek over the last sixty pages. Now you’ll never know how it ends. You tried listening to David Goggins’s “Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds,” on Audible, in your car, but so thrilling was Goggins’s prose style that you stomped on the gas and rear-ended a Tesla. Do not despair, though. Succor is at hand. Roosting on Amazon’s best-seller list is “Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier,” by Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey (Portfolio). At this point, your conscience rebels. By buying a book on Amazon, you tell yourself, you will be directly funding a new angora lining for Jeff Bezos’s monogrammed slippers in the master bedroom of his private yacht—not the main one but the backup vessel currently moored off Patmos. Quivering with righteousness, you close your laptop and stride to your nearest bookstore, only to bump into a dilemma: whereabouts in the store, exactly, can “Build the Life You Want” be found? When two writers join forces, it can be tricky to sort out who did what. Not in this case. Brooks is the principal player, and Oprah is his guest star. Only four times does she enter the action to offer “A Note from Oprah,” and the four notes, added together, take up less than fourteen pages in a book that is more than two hundred and forty pages long. What does she bring, then, apart from the humongous commercial clout of her blessing? Well, she reveals that “The Oprah Winfrey Show” was “always at heart a classroom. I was curious about so many things, from the intricacies of the digestive system to the meaning of life.” (Had she been French, of course, those two items would have been the same.) Near the start of the book, ever alert to her audience, she scrunches what she considers Brooks’s most valuable lesson into “words you should tape to your refrigerator,” and, for extra clarity, accelerates into italics: “Your emotions are only signals. And you get to decide how you’ll respond to them.” One more scrunch, and Oprah has the mantra she wants: “Feel the feel, then take the wheel.” Continued here Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium People v. Cancer 2023 Summit - The Atlantic - The Atlantic    What once seemed impossible in cancer research and treatment is, with technology and data-driven innovations, fast becoming reality. Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, immunotherapy, prevention, and equitable accessibility are revolutionizing care and accelerating progress in the fight to end cancer. Join us for The Atlantic’s sixth annual People v. Cancer for interactive demonstrations, the unveiling of groundbreaking research, and in-depth conversations from the front lines of the cancer community. Should you require special accommodations or for more information about accessibility, please contact us at events_audience@theatlantic.com at least 48 hours in advance of the event. Unlock unlimited access to The Atlantic, including exclusive events for subscribers. Join us today and help ensure a bright future for independent journalism. Continued here Plant Seeds Are Stuck - The Atlantic    The extinction of animals is a huge problem for plants that rely on them to escape warming habitats. Haldre Rogers’s entry into ecology came via the sort of man-made calamity that scientists euphemistically call an “accidental experiment.” She’d taken a job in 2002 on the Pacific island of Guam and the neighboring Mariana Islands to study the invasive brown tree snakes that were introduced to Guam, likely from a cargo ship, shortly after World War II. In the ensuing decades, these large snakes thrived, obliterating many native animals. Continued here

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