I’m trying a new thing. Well, it’s really an old thing, but it’s new for me. About six billion years ago, people used blogs to share links they thought were cool. Then social media killed blogs and people started sharing links on Twitter. Now, social media is unbearable so I’m sharing them here.
“What shocked me at the very beginning, when I was kidnapped [by US immigration], was just how reminiscent that was to cases I witnessed in Syria,” he says. “You would have plainclothed officers without any warrant come and take you just because of your political speech.”
And:
For Khalil, the lowest moment came on the night his son was born. His requests for a furlough to attend the birth were denied and so he was forced to listen on the phone in the middle of the night, whispering quiet words of encouragement as Abdalla laboured. The line cut around 2am, and by the time he called back he heard his newborn son crying in the background. He whispered the call to prayer down the line to welcome baby Deen into the world.
“It was a very difficult moment that I don’t wish anyone to go through,” he says, his eyes drifting. “It was a clear act of cruelty just to punish me.”
Children who need critical medical care are trapped in Gaza. Israel won’t let them out:
According to the World Health Organization in December, the pace of medical evacuations out of Gaza was so slow that it would take up to 10 years to clear the list of referrals.
Pay phones? More like free phones: (h/t, Metafilter):
Schlott has taken old pay phones, modified them to make free calls, and set them up in three different towns across the county. He buys the phones secondhand from sites like eBay and Craigslist and restores them in his home workshop.
The essay plan is emerging days after administration officials said they would apply increased scrutiny on whether citizenship applicants meet a standard for “good moral character.”
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