War, politics, climate change & food, in the Middle East & elsewhere. Editing investigations @ThePublicSource. Writing (tor)mentor. RTs=interested in everything
Beirut, Chicago, New York
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Get ready for the next stage of genocide: when all the pundits & academics & journalists who stood by & did nothing, said nothing, risked nothing, will suddenly have *so much* to say. Their empty words will fill oceans
Oh, the panels they'll hold! Think tankers & fancy academics & analysts & pundits will throw around nonsense words like "the optics" & they will all shake their heads & cluck about How it Happened.
Meanwhile the people who actually tried to stop it will have been fired.
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does this remind you. of anything.
ALT "“I wasn’t planning on letting her stay, but I didn’t know what the hell was going on,” the man said of his Venezuelan migrant neighbors. But he quickly relented. The little girl was inconsolable and hid under his bed. “I didn’t want them to take her,” said the man, who didn’t want to be named because he fears he’ll be targeted by federal authorities for his actions. “I gave her my bedroom, and I just told her, ‘Just stay there. Don’t open, don’t, shh, just stay quiet,’” he recalled telling the mom and daughter as he choked back tears."
During a military-style raid on a building in Chicago’s South Shore, one resident heard a knock on his door.
It wasn’t the feds — it was a mom and her 7-year-old daughter, pleading for help.
He let them hide in his unit for the next 3 days.
chicago.suntimes.com/immigra…
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"We have two people dead in DC. We have 50,000 dead in Gaza. How many children starved to death last night?"
The DC Shooter's neighbour speaks, calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza
Stating that violence is not the way, he took the spotlight to call on the US President to end the bloodshed, focusing attention on the starving children of Gaza.
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The fire was caused by a space heater. Meaning the fire was caused by a landlord.
People using space heaters means a. broken windows, or b. landlord illegally withholding heat.
This building has 174 violations. Including for heat.
Is @NYCMayor going to do something about this?
A fire in a Bronx apartment building on Sunday killed at least 19 people, including nine children. A total of 63 people were injured.
“This is going to be one of the worst fires that we have witnessed during modern times,” Mayor Eric Adams said. nyti.ms/3naAp91
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Always flattering when the New York Times rips off your story three months later lol
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They. Were. Locked. Inside.
39 men, burned alive inside a migrant detention center, under America's Migrant "Protection" Protocols.
This is our modern-day Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.
washingtonpost.com/world/202…
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"Beirut is a city of balconies.... Balconies and rooftops overflowed with greenery: geraniums, bougainvillea, rosemary, and frangipani. A city of gardens in midair."
—Day of Honey, by me
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The mayor is lying.
The building had 174 violations, 18 of them open. Multiple complaints for heat and hot water.
The landlord is on the mayor's transition team—for housing.
Here's the ownership of the building. The man listed as landlord, Rick Gropper, is on @NYCMayor's transition team—for housing:
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Here's the ownership of the building. The man listed as landlord, Rick Gropper, is on @NYCMayor's transition team—for housing:
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When you think you're the master race but you can't write English at a third grade level
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We need to be treating this double murder in New Jersey as a political act.
In case you don't know the details: the nephew of a local police chief, radicalized by Andrew Tate & Charlie Kirk, murdered two girls with his SUV.
If he'd used a gun we'd all be talking about this.
Before Vincent Battiloro ran down Maria Niotis and Isabella Salas with his SUV. On livestream he said, "Whenever Maria sees the pizza guy come. Better think of Charlie Kirk, for making fun of his f*kin death. You stupid-ass clown. Just remember that."
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If you've ever gone to tenant meetings in low-income Black & Brown neighborhoods, you know that one of the most frequent complaints is low or no heat. Often coupled with broken windows.
The investors who own these properties lavish $$$$ on politicians instead of on repairs.
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Sure, cops save lives. So do housing inspectors.
Imagine if we had as many housing inspectors as cops.
Imagine if politicians cared about renters.
Imagine if sleazy landlords didn't run this city—and don't forget, our last president started out as a New York City slumlord.
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Oh, she wondered, did she? Let me clear that up for her. They weren't protesting at Trump rallies because they weren't Trump voters. They were protesting at DNC rallies because that was the party that claimed to represent them. And instead of doing so told them to shut up & die.
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The amazing inspectors @NYCHousing do an incredible job of following up on these complaints, btw. But it's a neverending battle—for slumlords, paying fines & buying politicians is almost always cheaper than doing actual repairs.
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In case anyone's naive enough to believe all the trolls claiming they're "just going back to their home countries"—here's a list of ways you can die in CECOT, one of the gulags they're disappearing people to:
hrw.org/news/2025/03/20/huma…
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Reliant is associated with 123 other buildings in New York City. Most of them in low-income neighborhoods.
whoownswhat.justfix.nyc/en/a…
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"The fire was caused by a space heater" =
The fire was caused by a landlord.
Here's the complaint history for this building. Note the frequent complaints of NO HEAT.
Charge this landlord with 19 counts of murder, @NYCMayor
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Hezbollah did, in fact, help Assad enforce starvation sieges on villages and towns in Syria. That doesn't justify anything that Israel has done. But we don't have to whitewash Nasrallah in order to condemn Israel's genocidal impunity & many war crimes—including his assassination.
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The great @RalphNader has been begging Democrats to do this for years. He calls it "midnight campaigning," & it's a slam-dunk if you want to reach working-class voters. Genius that Zohran's people actually picked up on this
democracynow.org/2022/10/25/…
"'Less Zero Bond,' he said, a reference to Mr. Adams’s favorite private club in Manhattan. He added that he wanted to visit nurses and bus operators on the night shift, raising New Yorkers 'often forgotten from the darkness and into the light.'"
nytimes.com/2025/10/31/nyreg…
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Gonna keep asking: does anyone know if there's a GoFundMe for the people from this building in Chicago?
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lmao @MikeBloomberg's army of paid fake stans sent identical letters to the @NYDailyNews & they printed them, I'm fucking dying
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To hell with landlords, to hell with real estate investors, to hell with our billionaire-take-all approach to housing.
To a very special place in hell with the ghouls who profit from so-called "affordable" housing.
All the love to NYC tenant organizers & advocates.
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Here's the ownership of the building. The man listed as landlord, Rick Gropper, is on @NYCMayor's transition team—for housing:
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These two Japanese scholars translated every single Umm Kulthoum song from Arabic into Japanese *and English*
We don't deserve this but here it is:
minpaku.ac.jp/nihu/cmmes/act…
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You can also die in ICE detention, of course: theguardian.com/us-news/2025…
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This guy was a legend.
If you've been following anything Israel does in this war you know that they deliberately target healers, gardeners, peacekeepers, cooks (like Medo Halimy in Gaza, to name just one example). But it still shocks me. Every time. Even after all we've seen.
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Actually all decent people do want healthcare for people no matter what their status is. That's called being human
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Big shout out to the good folks @JustFixNYC, who run #WhoOwnsWhat, a cool free tool that helps you research NYC property owners using public, open data. It works on any device with an internet connection! Search your address here: whoownswhat.justfix.nyc/en
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"Never say no to the client" deserves to be remembered along with "just following orders" and "do your work" in the history of genocide
A former Green Beret who worked for GHF, the org responsible for the daily bloodbaths at Gaza aid sites, says he was ordered by an IDF soldier to shoot at children.
Then he was disciplined for ignoring him, because he was explicitly told GHF worked for the Israeli military.
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No, Mr. Mayor, that is NOT the message.
The building where 19 people burned to death had 174 violations. 18 of them still open.
The landlord is on your transition team. For housing.
Tell your landlord friends to close the open violations.
NYC Mayor Eric Adams says there's a key message to take from devastating Bronx fire: "Close the door."
"If we can drill that in, we can save lives...This painful moment can turn into a purposeful moment." abcn.ws/3fayYD2
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Kinda like this:
"Without Facebook, we wouldn't have won."
—Theresa Hong, digital content director for Trump's 2016 campaign
BBC Stories
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It's not just Arab-Americans and it's not just Michigan, folks
Looking at polling, it feels like Biden may have already lost Michigan. His total, almost aggressive indifference to the human suffering in Gaza is not playing well with the Arab-American bloc, an enduring sentiment likely to spread to other voters as awareness increases.
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lmao at all the extremely real people chiming in here! Note the identically worded responses from two separate accounts lol
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Hey, heard about that new onslaught of Russian propaganda?
Anyhoo here's a totally legitimate account that is 💯 a real Palestinian person.
She really likes Jack Posobiec, who is loved by Palestinians everywhere.
Oh & she also happens to post some anti-Ukrainian tweets too
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Here's a no-paywall link: wapo.st/3MgiLOH
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Not-so-fun fact: The British deliberately starved Lebanese people to death in World War I.
In 1916, the British & French were both blockading Lebanon to prevent food from reaching enemy territory. The French wanted to lift the blockade. The British wanted the Lebanese to starve.
ALT "in May 1916 Maronite Archbishop Joseph Darien protested the use of famine for political ends, urging the French consul in Cairo to demand an immediate Entente invasion to save lives. Although the French had by then received reports of up to 80,000 deaths, Foreign Minister Aristide Briand spurned the consul’s pleas to invade, arguing that it would only provoke a general massacre. The consul then urged that France break the blockade & ship food to Lebanon. A June 2 British memo to the foreign ministry, however, flatly rejected the proposal to feed starving civilians: 'His Majesty’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs expresses his earnest hope that the French Government will not encourage any such scheme. . . . the Entente Allies are simply being blackmailed to remedy the shortage of supplies which it is the very intention of the blockade to produce.' The British “consider the famine as an agent that will lead the Arabs to revolt,” noted a June 4 internal French foreign ministry...
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"Adams ordered the clearing of hundreds of homeless camps and sent an additional 1,000 police officers to patrol subways and remove homeless people from train cars and platforms. He also simultaneously cut $615 million from the city’s Department of Homeless Services."
Respect to The Intercept and @akela_lacy for going hard as fuck on this. This is vital work.
Link: theintercept.com/2023/05/03/…
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"In 1956, Israel invaded Sinai, they invaded Gaza. The US president at the time, Dwight Eisenhower, put his foot down... He told Israel to get the heck out of Sinai, & out of Gaza. Now where the heck would we be today if we had a president that could've said that two years ago?"
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Some people can't get it together to say "I loathe texting, please communicate with me literally any other way" which is what I tell all my friends. Sorry she was so rude about it
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They killed him while he was tending his hives
الا/حتلال يستهدف ويقتل النحال محمد نصر الله اثناء رعايته أقفار النحل في أرضه في بلدة #حولا الجنوبية
#لبنان #جرائم_حرب #جنوب_لبنان
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I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you bulldozed my house, impounded my tent, and threw my stuff in the trash
Matthew 25:35
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It was 19 hijackers, not 12. And 15 of them were Saudi citizens.
You may not remember 9/11, but some of us do.
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Here's the past year's complaint history for this building. Note the frequent complaints of NO HEAT.
People using space heaters means the landlord is breaking the law.
Is @NYCMayor going to do his job here? Because this landlord should be charged with 19 counts of murder.
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A row of heavily armed men guards a row of ambulances.
Wouldn't want any of those charred corpses to reanimate & try to cross the border "illegally"
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And if you want to join or help some of the heroic tenants' rights groups here in NYC, there are so many, but: hit up @Met_Council on housing, which does great lobbying/ legislative/organizing work; @ANHDNYC; the Urban Justice Center's amazing @SafetyNetUJC; @HousingFirstNYC
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If you want to help some of the families, @_ShamGod has posted a GoFundMe here: nitter.app/_ShamGod/status/148032…
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The march with the guy who said God sent Hitler? The antisemitic Christian extremist who preaches that Jews will convert or die when Jesus returns to the Holy Land to rule from his throne on the Temple Mount? That march?
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Friends, I'm begging you, please be careful which #Mastodon server you join.
I was looking for a server. What I found was a lesson in groupthink, disinformation, & the importance of digital vigilance.
This is the weirdest, most unsettling saga I've found online in a long time.
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One of the disturbing things about this attack is that they brought their own embedded "journalists" on the raid in order to create a parallel reality where they're "keeping us safe." This kind of propaganda is a hallmark of authoritarian dictatorships: newsnationnow.com/us-news/im…
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Once again I am begging you all to learn how to spell Islamophobia correctly. We're going to need to know this unfortunately
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hell of a lede here
Good example of the importance of book reviews. This will probably fuck up whatever plans she had, to some degree washingtonpost.com/books/202…
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"One woman holding a baby wept and pounded on the door of an ambulance that hadn’t yet left the site, crying, “Pedro! Pedro!” according to a video shot by news outlet Norte Digital."
ALT A weeping woman clutching her cell phone leans against the side of a structure, possibly a trailer, while an ambulance sheds red light on firefighters and other uniformed figures in the background
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"Islamic Rape of Europe"—Polish magazine #wSieci
Just change "Islamic" to "Jewish" and it's Poland in the late 1930s
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The paramedic who declined to take her to the hospital asked her what her goals in life were in order to calm her down.
Breathing heavily, she replied: “My goal is not to die today.”
RANA ZOE MUNGIN, a beloved 6th grade social studies teacher in Brooklyn, New York, died of COVID-19.
She was 30 years old. She was turned away from an emergency room twice after initially developing a fever.
Via @MurphyPIX
pix11.com/news/coronavirus/b…
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Choosing a #Mastodon server increasingly feeling like that moment in the junior high school cafeteria where you stand there frozen, clutching your plastic tray, feeling sure that the wrong decision will doom you for the rest of your life
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A good journalist never pretends to know what someone "believes" or "thinks." You can only know what they said.
You grossly and bigotedly misrepresented what he actually said.
What he said is: “I'm not comfortable supporting any state that has a hierarchy of citizenship on the basis of religion or anything else.... Equality should be enshrined in every country in the world. That's my belief."
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That's quite an allegation. Do you have any documentation of Mamdani supporters beating and harassing you? Or anyone, for that matter?
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"Mr. Spiegelman recalls an incident in Germany in 1987, when a reporter barked at him, “Don’t you think that a comic book about the Holocaust is in bad taste?”
The author responded, “No, I thought Auschwitz was in bad taste.”
nytimes.com/2011/10/13/books…
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Last week, a big American newspaper asked if I wanted to weigh in on the Beirut Explosion.
I lived in Beirut for the better part of 15 years. I wrote a book about my time there. As you might imagine, I have a lot to say.
Ten years ago—hell, five years ago—I might've said yes.
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Friends, let's talk about fear.
Some fear is productive. It keeps us alive.
Some fear is destructive. It keeps us terrified, paralyzed, &, most of all, obedient.
Which is which? How can we tell the difference?
A tale of two threads about the #coronavirus.
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I keep thinking of this incandescent line, by the great @warghetti, after the 2020 Beirut Port Blast
ALT "Growing up in Lebanon taught me that an explosion resonates across time, that the shock reverberates forward into your life, and the pressure reconfigures the landscape of the mind. I know that it comes to shape everything you think you deserve from the world. The people of Beirut have been shaped by the bombs that reconfigured this country."
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I have asthma. I have zero problem wearing a mask. You know why? Because if I get COVID thanks to people who think their convenience is more important than my life, I'll die.
Wearing a mask is not a problem for us asthmatics. That's a myth. The End.
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The great Dietrich Bonhoeffer, murdered by the Nazi regime, wrote that stupidity was not just a failure of intelligence—stupidity, he wrote, is above all a moral failure.
I think about this every time I see a tweet from @BriannaWu
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Fact. I was raised to always have a pocketknife or a utility knife handy—for yard work, something around the house, and for sure in the car.
And anyway... people are looking askance at a knife when someone just crossed state lines & shot two people with an assault rifle?
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Fun fact: the Allies also blockaded Syria, Lebanon & Palestine during that same time period. This is actually the second time Western countries have starved Mediterranean Arabs to death.
But of course she wouldn't know anything about that. Despite her "deep ties" to the region.
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"El Diario de Juárez, citing anonymous sources in Mexico’s federal prosecutor’s office, reported that the men were brought to the facility after an immigration raid."
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ICE doesn't have to kill them. We're already disappearing people to dictatorships, like El Salvador & Uganda, where they could be dying as we speak & nobody would ever know.
The conspiracy theory is there to distract us from the thing that is already happening in plain sight
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How's your Arabic? Ever met a Syrian—an actual Syrian, from Syria? Been to Damascus? Or Beirut?
Unlike you, I've actually met the Syrians that you're smearing as terrorists. Quite a few of them, in fact. Has it occurred to you that "jihadist proxies" is Islamophobic bigotry?
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Devastating quotes in this heartbreaking piece:
"When asked if there is a “certain door” the ambulance should go to, the caller from Amazon states, “It would be the main entrance door. They are very familiar with the entrance. They come here quite often, sadly to say.”"
On June 2, Roger Kieca died working at an Amazon warehouse in Joliet, IL. Amazon said his death was not work-related. But a recording of a 911 call, obtained by FOIA, states "dehydration" as the likely cause of his medical emergency. By me & @JeffSchuhrke. inthesetimes.com/article/ama…
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We do not accept.
"“Kill a Waymo! Save a Cat!” read a sign placed on the altar. “Kitty cats, not killer cars,” yelled a woman as she walked by."
RIP KitKat, beloved bodega cat killed by a Waymo:
missionlocal.org/2025/10/kit…
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How in God's name does any reputable outlet quote Yossi Landau without mentioning that he lied about personally seeing beheaded babies? That other first responders fabricated stories about babies burned in ovens? How did the editors not flag that? It's completely irresponsible
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An entire generation of children grew up without any kind of schooling for years on end as a result of that invasion. Tens of millions of kids. Years and years and years.
But tell me again how much you've suffered, Nate
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Friends, readers, eaters: I wrote about how @ZohranKMamdani's campaign used the oldest & most powerful form of political propaganda. And no, it's not vertical videos
newrepublic.com/article/1973…
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Also Barnard President: I just fired an eight-month pregnant custodian so I wouldn't have to pay for her maternity leave. I am very moral and know the difference between right and wrong
columbiaspectator.com/news/2…
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So the New York Times finally retracted #Caliphate.
It's not enough. The problem goes much deeper than one lying source, one tainted podcast, one horrible reporter.
We need to take a hard look at ourselves. All of us. Not those of us who produce the news; we who consume it too.
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