Friday: Hili dialogue

May 15, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Friday, May 15, 2026, and Malcolm X Day, celebrated on the third Friday in May. Here’s a near-final scene from Spike Lee’s great movie “Malcolm X” (1992, my favorite of his). Malcolm drives to the auditorium where he’ll be assassinated, passing his killers in another car, and then walks–or rather rolls–to the venue.  The music is the greatest of all soul songs: “A Change is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke.

It’s also Endangered Species Day, International Conscientious Objectors Day (I was one), National Chocolate Chiop Day, Jerusalem Day, and NASCAR Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 15 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*At the summit between Trump and Chinese leader Xi in Beijing, the priority for Trump is economic agreement, while for Xi it appears to be getting the U.S. to soften its support for Taiwan, which Xi wants to take over. The WaPo reports on the difference in emphasis.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping warned President Donald Trump on Thursday that “conflicts” could emerge if the two powers mishandle Taiwan, declaring that Beijing’s top priority in talks with the United States is the fate of the contested island long supported militarily by Washington.

Xi’s message — delivered behind closed doors in an hours-long meeting in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People — was all the more striking given Trump’s effort to warm up relations and deliver trade deals to boost the U.S. economy. It came after Xi welcomed Trump at an elaborate ceremony overlooking Tiananmen Square, where the Chinese military crushed pro-democracy protesters in 1989.

Trump brought dozens of top U.S. business leaders with him on the trip and has made deepened trade ties a focus, downplaying the military rivalry between the two nations. Although Trump said later that the meeting was “great,” Xi’s remarks, as reported bythe Chinese Foreign Ministry, made clear that the Chinese leader intended to focus on security at a moment when Trump has shown greater willingness to flex U.S. military might.

“The Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-U. S. relations,” Xi said, according to the Foreign Ministry readout. “If it is handled properly, the bilateral relationship will enjoy overall stability. Otherwise, the two countries will have clashes and even conflicts, putting the entire relationship in great jeopardy.”

. . .China has long claimed sovereignty over Taiwan, a democratic island territory that is a powerhouse manufacturer of semiconductors and other technology. The United States, while not officially recognizing Taiwan as an independent country, is the territory’s major military backer. U.S. war planning for east Asia envisions how to defend the island against a Chinese invasion aimed at reasserting Beijing’s authority.

“China’s military threats are the sole cause of instability for the Taiwan Strait and the Indo-Pacific region,” Taiwanese government spokeswoman Michelle Lee told reporters Thursday. “Our government views positively any actions that contribute to regional stability and help manage the risks posed by the expansion of authoritarian influence.”

The U.S,. has no formal defense treaty with Taiwan (we once did, but it was ditched in order to establish relations with China), but we do have nonbinding agreements to provide Taiwan with arms and other defense aid if it’s attacked. But we have no obligation to give military help. What this means to me is that it would be easy for Trump, if he wants better economic relations with China, to tell Xi that we’re not going all out to defend Taiwan against Chinese military action. The PRC has implied that “reunification” should occur fairly soon, but not necessarily by military means. But the Taiwanese will never assent to joining with China, so any “unification” would have to be done by force.

*In Amit Segal’s latest column at “It’s Noon in Israel,” the author speculates about how the Israeli elections, which have been moved earlier, might turn out, and reports on Netanyahu’s recent interview on 60 Minutes, where the PM “squirmed” when asked about Chinese involvement in the war in Iran. Segal then discusses that involvement:

China, unlike Qatar, does not support Iran out of love for the Ayatollahs, nor out of hatred for Israel. It does so because it needs chaos in the Middle East that will drain US resources and attention away from Taiwan and the South China Sea. For Xi Jinping, every dollar the US invests in interceptors for Israel is a dollar not invested in submarines in the Strait of Malacca. This quiet war is China’s way of buying time in the clash of titans against the United States. The Iran war is where the Chinese are testing American boundaries and their willingness to go all the way.

The event is only getting more complicated. Take the Strait of Hormuz, for example. The Iranians are trying to create a new equation and control the world through violent control over the straits. This might be good for the Iranians, but for the Chinese, it is terrible. Why? Because while transit through Hormuz is important to the Chinese, transit through the Strait of Malacca is much more important. This is a narrow strait between Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore, practically controlled by the US. Eighty percent of China’s oil imports pass through it. If the method of blocking shipping lanes becomes a legitimate means, it means the US will acquire almost absolute control over the Chinese. And that is just one example.

Another example comes specifically from Israel: the amount of military knowledge and capabilities built and tested here over the past three years is historically unprecedented. Israel is considered today around the world as a formidable power with field-tested experience. The war is the world’s largest testing lab for artificial intelligence on the battlefield. When Israel disrupts UAV swarms or eliminates 20 scientists in Iran in a few seconds, it makes its superiority practical. Trump brings receipts showing that Chinese technology is inferior to the Israeli-American mind, clarifying to them that he holds the tap to the knowledge and the blockade against everything they are trying to achieve. In this battle, Israel is the US’s combat R&D department, and for Trump, this is a tremendous bargaining chip.

Trump knows that the one keeping Iran alive today, even if quietly, is the empire from the East. They are the ones still trading with the Iranians while bypassing sanctions; they are the ones providing them with intelligence and even certain types of weaponry. For the Chinese, for example, air defense batteries are considered offensive weapons, but ballistic missiles are somehow defined as defensive weapons. Go figure.

Just as Israel set a goal for itself to break the Middle Eastern axis of evil, Trump set a goal for himself to break the Chinese-Russian-Iranian-North Korean axis of evil. If he disconnects the Chinese from the axis—he will weaken it significantly and bring it closer to the goal he desires so much: an absolute and indisputable victory, in a short time, and with a relatively low number of casualties.

The talks in Beijing are ongoing, and so far not much has been leaked.

In response to the release of the Civil Commission Report on sexual violence against Israelis on October 7, and Nicholas Kristof’s ill-sourced column on Israeli sexual violence against and dg rape of prisoners, the WSJ has issued two editorials. The first is about the Report itself, “The truth about Hamas,”  You can read about these examples in the Report (you can find it here).

Reading “Silenced No More,” the new report by the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children, we were transported back to Oct. 27, 2023, and a screening of the raw footage of Hamas’s atrocities. The mouths of journalists were agape, but time dulls horrific reality.

The new report is a catalogue, for memory’s sake, of Hamas depravity. Testimony from site after site attests to rape and assault. Screams and pleas. Gunshots to the face and genitals. Mutilation. Burning. Bodies naked, legs spread. Grotesque scenes staged. All forming an evidentiary record, the result of more than 10,000 photos and video segments and more than 430 interviews, testimonies and meetings with survivors, witnesses and experts.

Yoni Saadon recounts another horror: “She fell to the ground, shot in the head, and I pulled her body over me and smeared her blood on me so it would look as if I was dead too. . . . I will never forget her face. Every night I wake to it and apologize to her, saying ‘I’m sorry.’” Later he saw “a beautiful woman with the face of an angel and 8 or 10 fighters beating and raping her.” The last one shot her in the head. Each example here is of a civilian non-combatant.

Why is this being published when the details are out in the open? Because many people don’t believe them or choose to ignore them. As the article says:

We regret having to relate such details, but it is crucial to remember when the understandable human impulse is to forget such horrors. All the more so because the sexual violence by Hamas has been aggressively denied by an antisemitic global left that wants us to forget. Everywhere denial serves the same purpose: to distort Israel’s defensive war as if it were wanton violence. Such deniers prefer anything to reminding the world why Israel has no choice but to fight for its life.

The other op-ed, “Kristof’s unbelievable tale” (subtitle: “The columnist publishes a poorly sourced, fantastical tale of torture and dog rape in Israel”), goes after the columnist’s (and the NYT’s) hamhanded piece:

A little‑known Geneva‑based NGO called Euro‑Med Human Rights Monitor published a report in June 2024 alleging that the Israeli military was using dogs to attack Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including to “sexually assault prisoners and detainees in Israeli detention facilities.” Quoting testimony attributed to Palestinian detainees, Euro‑Med claimed that the dogs, equipped with “surveillance cameras” strapped to their backs, were “let loose” on prisoners, torturing them “systematically and sometimes collectively.”

Euro‑Med’s report received no attention from mainstream outlets when it was released, and for good reason. Israel has linked the group’s leadership to Hamas. Euro-Med has a documented record of promoting wild allegations against Israel, including claims of organ harvesting of Palestinian detainees, mass executions in hospitals, and denials of well‑established Hamas activity at Gaza’s Al‑Shifa hospital. This week, Euro-Med’s far‑fetched allegations found their way into a New York Times opinion piece penned by Nicholas Kristof.

Mr. Kristof cites allegations by “Palestinian prisoners” and “human rights monitors” that Israeli police dogs have been “coached to rape prisoners.” He offers no evidence for this in the column, but later defended the claim on X, citing “three different medical journal articles” about rectal injuries from anal penetration by dogs. Yet the scientific literature describes human‑initiated bestiality, not dogs assaulting humans, which may not even be anatomically possible.

The more I read about Kristof’s defense the angrier I get. How dare he use evidence from bestiality to buttress claims of Israelis dog-torture? Anyway, the article goes on to debunk two of Kristof’s named sources as shill for Hamas propaganda, and ends this way:

Sexual assault in prisons is an unfortunate reality worldwide, and sexual violence in war is well‑documented. Hamas used systematic rape and sexual violence during its attacks on Israel on Oct. 7 as detailed in a comprehensive report released this week by the Israeli Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes. Such allegations are grave and demand proper investigations and rigorous reporting.

Mr. Kristof’s column doesn’t meet that standard. Instead, it relies on a patchwork of omissions, dubious sources and ever‑more lurid allegations, serving more to demonize Israel than to clarify what actually happened. Worse is that this kind of reporting erodes trust in journalism and makes it harder for genuine victims of sexual violence to be believed. They deserve better.

You don’t often see one MSM outlet go after another like this, but both Kristof and the NYT deserve it. I don’t often quote WSJ op-ed pieces as I find them too far on the right for my liking, but both of these editorials are sensible and, what’s more important, moral.  The NYT’s actions here are both stupid and immoral, spreading undocumented assertions that will hurt Israel, as the paper and Kristof surely know.

*Over at The Freethinker, Nick Cohen takes issue with the familiar argument that Western values derive from Christianity. His question: “What has Christianity to do with Western values?”

The notion that liberal democracy is only for Westerners and is the product of specifically Western religious traditions has always been asinine, however plausible it may have seemed in the early twenty-first century. Japan and South Korea are part of ‘the West’, after all. Far from being a sign of democratic solidarity, Christian identity politics has become the friend of every enemy of Western democracy.

Before I go further and explain why, I need to introduce a plethora of caveats. I am not talking about, let alone criticising, the majority of European Christians, who are as likely to support liberal ideals as anyone else. I am not finding fault with this aspect of Lutheran doctrine or that Vatican pronouncement. Cultural determinism is as wrong when it is used to maintain that religion poisons everything (as the late Christopher Hitchens used to say) as it is when it is used to announce that Christianity blesses everything and has given us democracy, feminism, human rights, and all that is good and lovely in the world. Totalising explanations always fail. They cannot handle complexity.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently made my point for me. Last November, the former atheist announced her conversion to Christianity and unintentionally revealed the fatuity of Christian identity politics as she did so.  Any genuine Christian reading the articles and interviews that accompanied her conversion would notice there was no embracing of the Nicene creed; no declaration that Hirsi Ali now believed in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father.

. . . . Citing Tom Holland’s claim in his 2019 book Dominion that Western morality, values, and social norms are ultimately products of Christianity, the former atheist said that she had realised that Christianity was the source of Western safeguards for freedom and dignity. ‘All sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity,’ she continued. To believe in freedom and to defend it one ought to be Christian.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has shown extraordinary courage in standing up to the threats of radical Islamists. Tom Holland is the nicest and most intellectually generous historian I have met.

But this is hopeless stuff. In much of Europe the struggle for human rights, which Hirsi Ali presumably admires, was in part a struggle over state religion. The Enlightenment was a reaction against the bigotry and slaughter of the European wars of religion. To this day French liberals insist on defending secularism because they remember the arbitrary power of the Catholic church and fear the arbitrary power of Islam. The drafters of the US constitution wisely prevented the state from passing any law affecting religious worship and belief because they wisely feared the power of the religious persecution.  It is not just that so many Western freedoms originated in the anti-clerical struggles of the Enlightenment – and it is ridiculous to say that they are nevertheless still somehow ‘Christian’ freedoms – but that the argument is circular. If everything comes from Christianity, even freedoms that were achieved in opposition to the constraints of state religions, then there can never be real change in the world. If everything comes from Christianity, then religion is stretched so thinly that it all but vanishes, as it clearly has in Hirsi Ali’s strangely faithless conversion. If everything is Christian, then nothing is Christian.

. . . Few people can go along with Hirsi Ali’s argument today. Those that do will be on the right or the extreme right. Liberal Christians or those who identify with the Christian tradition, such as Tom Holland, see democracy and human rights as flowing from Christian beliefs. But Christians with actual power are making a nonsense of their argument.

Extreme religious belief makes assaults on the Constitution easier. The faithful are obeying the Lord’s commands and they do not admit the right of any earthly constitution or ballot to restrain them. Hirsi Ali and many others fail to draw the parallels with the woke movement they deplore. To the worst type of progressive the West is the sole source of global oppression. Whiteness and Eurocentric beliefs are sins. And yet in the US Christian conservatives, who are spurred on by their opposition to progressive authoritarians, are no more willing to defend the West than their left-wing enemies.

This year will be a decisive year for the West. One way to get through it would be to end our self-serving and flattering cultural exceptionalism. The enemies of democracy are not only to be found in foreign tyrannies, they are among us. And the more devoutly they claim to uphold Western Christian values, the more likely it is that they are willing to subvert Western civilisation.

I suppose the thesis could be defended by arguing that “well, Christianity formed the good values, and they’ve being subverted historically by religion.” But that ignores the historical Enlightenment development of humanism as a reaction against Christianity and other religions.

*Finally, satire from The Babylon Bee: “The NYTimes reveals: Seven more shocking things Israel has trained animals to do” (h/t Luana).

As you may have heard, The New York Times revealed this week that Israel has a secret animal training program that literally teaches dogs how to waterboard prisoners. Scarily, that’s not all they’re teaching animals. Here are seven more shocking things that The New York Times has reported that Israel has coached animals to do:

  1. Trained goldfish to only live for three weeks and make kids sad when they die: Horrifying.
  2. Taught cats to be emotionally detached and self-centered: The evil is sickening.
  3. Trained a chicken to make that mocking chicken noise, but only when it sees New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof: So mean.
  4. Trained pigeons to fly around pooping on people: Unbelievably twisted.
  5. Taught a guinea pig how to pilot an Apache attack helicopter: Okay, that is a scary image.
  6. Trained a parrot to repeat whatever is said, slowly driving people insane: What kind of sick people are these?
  7. Taught a golden retriever how to play basketball and ultimately lead a Midwest high school team to the championship: We could not be more appalled.

We hope this list wakes people up to the disturbing reality of what Israel is doing with these poor, innocent animals.

And here’s one from Facebook:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is smelling the flowers

Hili: The scent of wisteria reaches all the way here.
Andrzej: It’s a nice smell.
Hili: I prefer the smell of catnip.

In Polish:

Hili: Aż tu dociera zapach wisterii.
Ja: To miły zapach.
Hili: Wolę zapach kocimiętki.

*******************

From The Dodo Pet:

From Meow Incorporated:

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:

From Masih: More protestors hanged in Iran this week:

From “Captain” Ella, with the English translation below:

Standing before the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem… And upon the Holy Quran… An Arab Muslim fighter in the Paratroopers Brigade—swearing allegiance in the Israel Defense Forces Long live the State of Israel. 

This Arab IDF member wouldn’t dare go near the Al-Aqsa mosque on top of the Western Wall, as he’d be killed. He’s thus forced to swear fealty before the remains of the Second (Jewish) Temple.

From Luana; NYU students are trying to get Jonathan Haidt, who wrote about the hypersensitivity of students, banned as a commencement speaker because he wrote about the hypersensitivity of college students. In fact, I can’t think of a better commencement speaker.  The link to the article is here.

From Simon; the Number Ten Cat is institutionally neutral:

One from my feed. I’d love a salticid as a pet but they don’t live very long:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was nine years old.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-05-15T10:11:59.767Z

And two from Dr. Cobb. First, the world’s most beautiful duck. Be sure to watch the video; that is some sexual dimorphism!

The Extraordinary male Mandarin Duck, the lighter one is the female is soft colours brown-grey with white and hint of blue at wing. They live in Eurasia. Life span is 3-6 years in the wild, and 10-20 in protected areas.

— 🇨🇦JOY 🇨🇦 (@joycomes.bsky.social) 2026-05-13T14:49:32.308Z

And an invasive species:

“Could you fucking NOT?!”

— 𝔸𝕞𝕓𝕖𝕣 𝔻𝕒𝕨𝕟 (@amberdawn1116.bsky.social) 2026-05-12T13:09:26.390Z

The Times ditched its public editor, but oy, does it need one now!

May 14, 2026 • 9:30 am

There have been a ton of articles criticizing Nicholas Kristof’s poorly sourced and dubious NYT column accusing Israel of widespread sexual torture of Palestinian prisoners (yes, with dogs, too)—most of the critiques noting that Kristof’s sources were unnamed, undocumented, and those that were named had histories of being pro-Hamas.  You can easily find these critiques on social media, but Hen Mazzig, an Israeli writer and senior fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute, levels a different accusation: not so much at Kristof but at the New York Times itself.

He notes something I overlooked: the paper used to have a “public editor” whose job was to call attention to errors and misreporting in the paper, but the NYT ditched that position nine years ago. Now there is no public editor: their job has been sourced to—get this—social media and readers.  The rationale is that social media itself, combined with reader reaction, will correct errors.  But that’s completely bogus. Yes, readers and social media may point out errors, as they have in this case, but thety also can reinforce them. As you know, social media is a dumpster fire and there’s no guarantee that a clash of ideas and assertions will surely out the truth.

Beyond that, it is the responsibility of the paper itself to correct errors, apologizing for them and admitting guilt. The NYT won’t do that, for it’s pushed back on the criticism of Kristof’s delusions, defending them by asserting—get this again—that he won two Pulitzer Prizes. With two nods like that, how can he be wrong? Here’s all the NYT has said:

In larger print; you can judge for yourself how extensive the “fact-checking” was, given that there was no public editor to describe it:

The deep-sixing of a public editor is almost an admission that a paper has no interest in correcting itself. You can see from the Times‘s doubling down in this latest case that the NYT is standing behind assertions of systemic sexual torture in the Israeli government, as well as in using trained dogs to rape prisoners.  The fact that Kristof’s factual claims were made in an op-ed does not excuse the paper.

Click below to read:

Some quotes:

In 2014, the New York Times had a Public Editor. Her name was Margaret Sullivan. When it emerged that Nicholas Kristof had spent years platforming a fabricator named Somaly Mam, Sullivan wrote that Kristof “owes it to his readers to explain, to the best of his ability and at length, what happened and why.” Kristof did. He wrote a column titled “When Sources May Have Lied.” Editor’s notes were added to old work. The mechanism worked.

In 2017, the Times eliminated the Public Editor role. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. announced that “readers and social media followers collectively serve as a modern watchdog.” Liz Spayd was the last to hold the job.

This week, Kristof published a column accusing Israel’s security forces of systematic sexual violence, sourced from a man who celebrated October 7, an NGO whose chairman was designated by Israel as a Hamas operative in 2013, and a fourteen-person account that grows more lurid each time it migrates to a larger platform. The Times defended the column with a statement from a spokesperson named Charlie Stadtlander, citing Kristof’s two Pulitzers. There is no Margaret Sullivan inside the building anymore. There is only Charlie.

That is the story I want to tell. Not the column. The column has been dissected by a dozen outlets in 36 hours. The story is what the column reveals about the institution that printed it, and about the decision the institution made nine years ago that produced this moment.

Yesterday I wrote about the sources:

The piece is The New York Times Has a Source Problem. The short version: two of Kristof’s primary sources are a man who left UCLA after a 17-year-old said he sent her unsolicited photos, and an NGO whose chairman publicly mourned a senior Hamas commander as “our great commander” earlier this year. The same NGO has officially called Hamas’s sexual violence on October 7 a “propaganda tool.” Its board chair endorsed 9/11 inside-job conspiracies.

I asked yesterday how the Times missed any of this when two Google searches would have surfaced all of it.

Today I want to ask why nobody inside the paper is allowed to ask that question on the record.

This afternoon a Times spokesman released a statement defending Kristof. The operative line:

“There is no truth to this at all. Nicholas Kristof is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has reported on sexual violence for decades.”

This was what happened when there was a public reporter and Kristof got his tuchas smacked:

Somaly Mam was a Cambodian woman who became globally famous on the strength of a story she told about her own childhood in sex slavery, and on the strength of the brothel rescues she said she conducted. Kristof made her career. He called her a “hero” in column after column. He live-tweeted her brothel raids to over a million followers. He featured her in his documentary Half the Sky.

In 2014, Newsweek published a piece by Simon Marks showing that Mam had auditioned girls to lie on camera. Her own backstory was fabricated. The “rescues” were sometimes police raids that generated headlines more than they helped victims. Mam resigned. The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple called for Kristof to audit his entire Cambodia archive. Kristof wrote that he wished he had never written about her, said he had been “hoodwinked,” and added editor’s notes to old columns.

His response when Margaret Sullivan and Erik Wemple pressed him was telling. He said it was hard to verify facts in Cambodia. He said he was “reluctant to be an arbiter” of Mam’s backstory. He said he didn’t know what to think.

This week, asked whether Palestinians might fabricate accusations to defame Israel, Kristof wrote that “to me that seems far-fetched.” That is the same credulity, twelve years older, applied to a higher-stakes accusation on a larger platform.

The Times has watched this reporter make this mistake before. In 2014 there was an internal voice with the authority to push him to answer for it. There is no such voice now.

There are other examples, but the point is that no such internal mechanism of correction exists. Instead, we get a defense, which Mazzig summarizes:

. . . The defense

This afternoon a Times spokesman released a statement defending Kristof. The operative line:

“There is no truth to this at all. Nicholas Kristof is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has reported on sexual violence for decades.”

The fuller statement credits Kristof for traveling to the region and says his article collects accounts in the victims’ own words, backed by “independent studies.” It does not name the studies.

Read it twice if you need to. Notice what it does not say. It does not address Euro-Med’s Hamas affiliation. It does not address Sami al-Sai’s October 8 Facebook post celebrating the massacre. It does not address Amro’s shifting account between the Washington Post and the Times. It does not address the absence of corroborating evidence in the column’s most explosive cases. It does not say what the “independent studies” are.

It says Kristof has Pulitzers and the Times stands behind him.

In 2014, the same paper produced a Public Editor’s column titled “When Mr. Kristof’s Sources Are Questioned” and an internal reckoning. In 2026, the same paper produces a press release.

Deborah Lipstadt, until recently the United States Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, asked the Times publicly whether it had any sense of decency. Lipstadt is the world’s leading historian of Holocaust denial. She knows what a blood libel looks like. When she names one out loud, the line has been crossed.

Mazzig hastens to add that he’s not saying Kristof is an antisemite or the NYT decided to hurt Jews. Nor is he claiming that Israel has never mistreated a prisoner, nor attacked one with dogs (I’d ask for evidence for both such claims, though). What he’s saying is this:

I am arguing something more dangerous because it is more boring. The editorial standards of the world’s most important paper have drifted, and the institution dismantled the internal voice that used to flag the drift. The defense statement issued today is what accountability looks like in a building where Margaret Sullivan no longer exists.

And he winds up going after the paper again:

The Times will probably not retract, but the conversation has started. Longtime contacts of media reporter David Shuster told him this afternoon there are discussions up the masthead. We will see.

What moves the needle is the accumulated record. The Somaly Mam parallel. The shifting Amro and al-Sai accounts. The verification asymmetry between American prisons and Israeli ones. The headline change on the Eurovision piece. The Silenced No More report. Lipstadt’s question. Yesterday’s piece and this one. Every citation builds the file.

That file is what real accountability requires. The Times made that file harder to build in 2017, and we are watching what that decision produced.

We know that the Times staff is full of young progressives—people who helped push out Bari Weiss, Donald McNeil, Jr., and James Bennet. They are sensitive to social media and public opinion, and the combination of progressive staff and social media is toxic.

The paper needs to correct Kristof’s column, for it’s clear he will not do so himself.

Readers’ wildlife photos

May 14, 2026 • 8:15 am

UC Davis ecologist Susan Harrison has returned with some photos about serpentine ecology. Susan’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them:

Serpentine ecology at The Cedars (Sonoma County, California)

“Serpentine” might be a familiar word if you live in a region with volcanos, earthquakes, and hot springs.  It’s an informal term for ultramafic (very high magnesium and iron) rocks, mainly serpentinite and its parent rock peridotite, as well as the soils formed from these rocks.  The common name comes from the often snakeskin-like appearance of serpentinite.  These rocks are twisted and fractured bits of the Earth’s mantle, first extruded into the ocean crust in midocean spreading centers, then fully or partly metamorphosed by hydration, and finally scraped onto land during the sliding of one tectonic plate under another – this last process being what also produces “ring of fire” volcanos and earthquake zones around the world.

Serpentinite:

Partly serpentinized peridotite:

Botanists and plant evolutionists have long been drawn to the unusual flora of serpentine.  Most plant species are intolerant of its harsh chemistry, especially the scarcity of calcium relative to magnesium, and space is thereby opened for hardier species to adapt and sometimes even speciate on serpentine.  In California’s flora of around 5,500 full species there are just over 1,000 “tolerators” that can grow either on or off of serpentine, and an estimated 255 “endemics” entirely restricted to this difficult soil.

Serpentine endemic plants in California include multiple Jewelflowers (genus Streptanthus, Brassicaceae), which have been studied to understand soil-driven adaptation and speciation.

Hoffman’s Bristly Jewelflower (Streptanthus glandulosus ssp. hoffmani):

Morrison’s Jewelflower (Streptanthus morrisoni), a non-flowering first-year individual:

Serpentine tolerators, like the Sickle-leaved Onion (Allium falcifolium), grow on varied soils.  Sometimes they show adaptive genetic differences between populations on and off of serpentine.

Sickle-leaved Onions:

Today’s photos are from a May 2026 excursion to one of the most remarkable serpentine sites in the world: The Cedars in western Sonoma County, California.  This site was named for its vast stands of Sargent’s Cypress (Cupressus sargentii), a serpentine-endemic tree.

The Cedars:

Part of The Cedars’ magic is that it’s a large (30 square km) and well-isolated block of serpentine within a benign coastal climate.  This seems to be a winning formula for promoting plant evolution, as witness four full species and three subspecies found nowhere else in the world.  Here are two species discovered by botanist Roger Raiche, who devoted decades to exploring and protecting The Cedars.

The Cedars Fairy Lantern (Calochortus raichei):

The Cedars Buckwheat (Eriogonum cedrorum):

A second charm of The Cedars is the surprising abundance of water in its austere landscape, probably because fractured serpentine rock masses tend to store rainwater and release it slowly, and also because many streams on serpentine have chemically cemented beds that create deep pools.  Streambanks here are fringed by Western Azalea (Rhododendron occidentale), Serpentine Columbine (Aquilegia eximia), and the two showy orchids shown below.

California Lady’s Slipper (Cypripedium californicum):

Giant Stream Orchid (Epipactis gigantea var. rubriflorum; photo by Nishanta Rajakaruna): \

The piece de resistance, sine qua non, ne plus ultra of The Cedars is its mineral springs. Until geologists discovered the strange chemistry of these springs in the 1960s, it was not known that serpentinization, the hydration of mantle rock, could occur in near-surface terrestrial environments.  Serpentinization supports anaerobic microbes that are collectively the most abundant life form on Earth; they are considered strong candidates for the origin of life, as well as for the possibility of life on other planets.

The spring known as Mineral Falls:

Part of the spring known as Wedding Cake:

Animal life is relatively scarce on serpentine. Here are two of only 8 bird species we saw in a full day at The Cedars.

Violet-Green Swallow (Tachycineta thalassina) hunting above Austin Creek:

Peregrine Falcon (Falco peregrinus) perched in the middle of a towering cliff:

JAC: I told Susan I couldn’t see the falcon, so she sent me a photo with the bird circled:

My friend Nishanta Rajakaruna has devoted his career to studying serpentine ecosystems around the world.   On field trips like this one, he collects photos of people leaping.

Leaping on serpentine (photo by Nishanta Rajakaruna; that’s me on the right):

Thursday: Hili dialogue

May 14, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, May 14, 2026 and International Dylan Thomas Day. (Curiously, the great poet was neither born nor expired on May 14, but Google tells me that “This date marks the anniversary of the first stage reading of his famous play, Under Milk Wood, at The Poetry Center in New York in 1953.) And it’s a very fine play, which you can read here.

Here’s a picture of Thomas’s house in Laugharne, Wales, with the preserved interior of his poetry-writing shack next door. Plus his only pair of cufflinks. I took these photos in June, 2010:

Where the poems were made:

Here’s Richard Burton reciting one of Thomas’s best poems, a childhood remembrance called “Fern Hill” (the recitation starts 15 seconds in):

It’s also “Stars and Stripes Forever” Day, honoring the John Philip Sousa march first performed on this day in 1897, National Brioche Day, and National Buttermilk Biscuit Day, celebrating the apotheosis of American baking.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 14 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Count on the NYT to give us only bad news about Iran; the latest is a piece called “U.S. Intelligence shows Iran retains substantial missile capabilities.”

The Trump administration’s public portrayal of a shattered Iranian military is sharply at odds with what U.S. intelligence agencies are telling policymakers behind closed doors, according to classified assessments from early this month that show Iran has regained access to most of its missile sites, launchers and underground facilities.

Most alarming to some senior officials is evidence that Iran has restored operational access to 30 of the 33 missile sites it maintains along the Strait of Hormuz, which could threaten American warships and oil tankers transiting the narrow waterway.

People with knowledge of the assessments said they show — to varying degrees, depending on the level of damage incurred at the different sites — that the Iranians can use mobile launchers that are inside the sites to move missiles to other locations. In some cases they can launch missiles directly from launchpads that are part of the facilities. Only three of the missile sites along the strait remain totally inaccessible, according to the assessments.

Iran still fields about 70 percent of its mobile launchers across the country and has retained roughly 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile, according to the assessments. That stockpile encompasses both ballistic missiles, which can target other nations in the region, and a smaller supply of cruise missiles, which can be used against shorter-range targets on land or at sea.

Military intelligence agencies have also reported, based on information from multiple collection streams including satellite imagery and other surveillance technologies, that Iran has regained access to roughly 90 percent of its underground missile storage and launch facilities nationwide, which are now assessed to be “partially or fully operational,” the people with knowledge of the assessments said.

The findings undercut months of public assurances from President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who have told Americans that the Iranian military was “decimated” and “no longer” a threat.

This may be true; how could any of us know? But the NYT never gives any news about U.S. advances in the war and, truth be told, I think the paper secretly wants the regime to remain in Iran, and want the US to lose—simply because the war is being led by the hated Trump.

*To the consternation (and perhaps glee) of Democrats, Trump has declared that American economic hardship is not a factor in how he conducts the war with Iran.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he does not consider the economic impacts the war in Iran is having on Americans, remarks that quickly drew criticism from Democrats and appeared to undermine his campaign pledge of addressing voters’ cost of living concerns.

“Not even a little bit‚” Trump said when asked to what extent “Americans’ financial situations” are motivating him to reach a deal to end the war. Trump spoke to reporters on the White House South Lawn before departing for his trip to China.

“The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran — they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody,” Trump said. “I think about one thing: we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”

The president doubled down on the sentiment when asked to clarify whether the economic impact on Americans was a factor in his decision-making. The U.S. inflation rate has risen to its highest rate in nearly three years since the start of the Iran war in late February, with increased prices largely driven by higher energy costs. Gas prices rose 5.4 percent last month and were up about 30 percent over the past year. Still, the U.S. stock market has continued to hit a series of records.

“Every American understands,” Trump said of economic issues related to the war, referencing an unnamed poll he said showed an overwhelming majority of people “understand that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.”

“Now if the stock market goes up or down a little bit, the American people understand,” Trump continued. “When this war is over, oil is going to drop, the stock market is going to go through the roof, and truly, I think we’re in the golden age right now. You’re going to see a golden age like we’ve ever seen before.”

Trump’s approval on economic issues, which were critical to his political comeback in 2024, has fallen since he launched the Iran war.

A recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that his approval rating on the economy has declined by seven points, to 34 percent, as gas prices have risen. Trump’s approval on inflation has fallen five points in that time to 27 percent, and his lowest rating comes on perceptions of his handling of the general cost of living, with 23 percent of Americans approving vs. 76 percent disapproving.

No, most Americans don’t understand why Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. But they should, and not just because they want Israel to survive. They should care because they want the Middle East to remain peaceful and for Iran to stop exporting terrorism to other countries. And they should care so that Iran can’t do whatever it wants because it has the capability to destroy other countries.  Trump will suffer for this stand, but I am with the minority of Americans who want to have this war brought to a successful conclusion. But I’m also one of those who don’t know whether and how it can be.

*One way of avoiding having to deal with Hamas’s atrocities of 2023 is to avoid looking at documentaries about them. It’s not squeamishness, but outright refusal to be convinced. This is what Maarten Boudy argues in his new Substack post, “None so blind as those who refuse to see.”

A while ago, I watched the infamous 47-minute video documenting the atrocities of October 7th — the one that is withheld from public release to protect the victims’ privacy. When the Israeli government invited European media to a private screening, several refused to attend, describing it as a “PR campaign” that “only serves to tilt the balance of proportionality” in the war. The Belgian parliament likewise refused to watch it, after protest from left-wing parties who dismissed it as Israeli propaganda. There are none so blind as those who refuse to see.

Some images are seared into my memory forever. I will never forget the two boys in their underwear, one with his eye socket hanging out of his face, asking his brother if he thinks they’re going to die — while the Hamas monster who had just thrown a grenade into their safe room helps himself to a drink from their fridge, taking a casual break from the slaughter.

Neither will I ever forget the terrorists playing football with a severed head. Or the throngs of Gazans crowding around pickup trucks loaded with the mutilated corpses of Jewish women, filming and spitting on the bodies. Or the terrorist coolly and methodically cutting off the head of an already dead victim, like a skilled butcher. Or the woman in Kibbutz Mefalsim, crouching and begging in vain for mercy. Or the Thai migrant worker whose head is viciously hacked off with a garden hoe — another “Zionist colonizer” getting what he deserved, right?

. . . But yes — there was rape. Not “rape” in scare quotes, as the apologists would have it, but sadistic, murderous sexual violence, documented in a damning new report by The Civil Commission, an independent Israeli women’s rights NGO. The report, titled “Silenced No More”, is based on hundreds of formal and informal interviews with survivors and witnesses, more than 10,000 photographs and over 1,800 cumulative hours of video.

. . . As the Daily Mail reports, the “freedom fighters” from Hamas deliberately and systematically defiled female bodies: “the terrorists shot their eyes, their faces and their breasts, and even targeted their most intimate parts, to destroy their beauty and rob their loved ones of a final goodbye.” Genitals were stabbed with knives or riddled with bullets, breasts were severed, pelvises broken.

. . .And it was premeditated and organized. The terrorists crossing into Israel carried printed Arabic-to-Hebrew phrasebooks with handy expressions like “take off your pants,” “lie down,” “spread your legs,” and “don’t make trouble.” I wonder why they expected to need those particular phrases?

I know one thing: no civilized country on earth would tolerate the existence of an organization like Hamas on its border after October 7th. Not one. This includes every self-righteous Westerner currently lecturing Israel from thousands of kilometres away, without an inch of skin in the game.

But of course quite a few Europeans refused to watch it, not because it was gruesome but because it was considered “Israeli propaganda.”

*As I’ve argued (influenced by Luana, who thinks that AI will pretty much wreck higher education), honor codes will be among the things that will have to change now that the bots have taken over. And, sure enough, Princeton University has just changed theirs.

For more than a century, Princeton University prided itself on an honor code so revered that proctoring during exams was banned. Students’ pledge not to cheat was enough.

Those days are over—largely because of AI.

On Monday, faculty voted to require proctoring in all in-person exams starting this summer, reversing a policy set in place in 1893 when Princeton introduced its honor code. The change came after “significant numbers” of undergrads and faculty requested it, “given their perception that cheating on in-class exams has become widespread,” according to a letter from Michael Gordin, Princeton’s dean of the college.

AI has made it both easier for students to cheat and harder to spot, Gordin wrote. Students are loath to report cheating because they are afraid they’ll be called out on social media. Those who do make reports often file anonymously, making it difficult for the school to investigate.

Princeton had been among the few schools to use an honor code letting students take exams without a professor present. Students will still be required to attest: “I pledge my honor that I have not violated the Honor Code during this examination.”

The code is embedded in the university’s culture and has long been a point of pride. It goes back to the 19th century, when students petitioned to eliminate proctors during examinations, according to the student newspaper.

The new policy means instructors will be present during exams and will document any infractions they observe. They will report those to a student-run honor committee for adjudication.

Nadia Makuc, a Princeton senior, chaired that committee during the past year. She said she thinks most students support the new policy because it alleviates pressure to report classmates. The committee received about 60 cases in the past year, an uptick, but she thinks most go unreported.

The ease of cheating has created a growing temptation, she said.

“If the exam is on a laptop, someone can just flip to another window. Or if the exam is in a blue book, it’s just people using their phone under their desk or going to the bathroom and using it,” she said.

In a survey of over 500 seniors conducted by the student newspaper last year, 30% reported they had cheated on an assignment or exam. Nearly half reported knowledge of an honor code violation but less than 1% had made a report.

Oy vey! 30% of the students reported cheating, and you know that’s an underestimate.  Gone are the days of take-home assignments or term papers; how could one permit them given that AI could write a very good one?  What about labs? Can you fake them? (I don’t think that would be easy.)  I always monitored exams, simply because I myself was monitored throughout college, and I wanted the students to be tested based on their own knowledge, not that of a bot. (They didn’t have bots when I was teaching.)

*On her Substack site Pens and Poison, Liza Libes beefs about Columbia University: “I thought I was going to study literature at Columbia. I was wrong.” The subtitle is “English departments teach ideology rather than literature.” Are you surprised?

I’d always been encouraged to chase my dreams.

For me, those were studying literature and becoming a famous writer.

. . .To me, then, the study of literature was by nature a traditionalpursuit—a discipline that believed in the preservation of beautiful things. It was a course of study that allowed us to probe the depths of our psyches and examine the questions that make us all human.

You can imagine my astonishment, then, when I learned that by some twisted perversion of fate, literature had become virtually synonymous with radical leftism in the contemporary literary academy.

. . .on the first day of my freshman English department seminar, we were given the writings of the so-called literary critic Edward Said.

The chapter in question—from his famous book Culture and Imperialism—was on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.

That was strange, I thought. Why were we reading criticism of a book without first having read the book itself?

I had read Mansfield Park in high school, so I could at least follow Said’s entire argument: that Mansfield Park was a novel about colonialism and imperialism.

Had we read the same novel—or, like many of the other students here reading critique before primary source text, had Said simply made up an idea without once ever having touched the actual book?

That evening, we were asked to produce a paragraph response to the Said chapter to prepare for our discussion that coming Thursday.

“The argument that Mansfield Park can only be understood from a colonial standpoint seems entirely farfetched,” I wrote. “Fanny’s entrance into her home as a metaphor for some colonizing force at work is too great a stretch.”

The professor was not very impressed. I had not sufficiently understood Said’s argument, in her eyes, and besides—it didn’t matter whether Mansfield Park was about imperialism or not—what mattered was that Jane Austen was complicit in British imperialist expansion.

. . .With every seminar I took, the overall aim of the Columbia University English department became clearer and clearer: these professors collectively wished to use literature as a force of resistance against “illiberal forces” to make our society a more just world for all.

But to me—someone who grew up with parents who’d fled the Soviet Union—Marxism wasn’t synonymous with liberalismin the least.

Sure, there was nothing wrong with trying to make our world more just and equitable—and there were so many great writers who had worked toward that aim—Shelley, Ibsen, Orwell, to name a few. But the promotion of social justice was simply one possible outcome of engagement with literature—not its sole aim.

But if you asked anyone in my department, literature was inseparable from resistance and justice.

. . . With every seminar I took, the overall aim of the Columbia University English department became clearer and clearer: these professors collectively wished to use literature as a force of resistance against “illiberal forces” to make our society a more just world for all.

But to me—someone who grew up with parents who’d fled the Soviet Union—Marxism wasn’t synonymous with liberalismin the least.

Sure, there was nothing wrong with trying to make our world more just and equitable—and there were so many great writers who had worked toward that aim—Shelley, Ibsen, Orwell, to name a few. But the promotion of social justice was simply one possible outcome of engagement with literature—not its sole aim.

But if you asked anyone in my department, literature was inseparable from resistance and justice.

By the time Ms. Libes started grad school to get her master’s, the courses were all theory and no literature.  Yet she still hopes others will join her in ” returning to aesthetics and beauty” thereby , ” [doing] our part in saving literature and restoring it to its rightful place in the humanistic tradition.”  But that, I fear is a vain hope.  The love of literature and beauty is an ex-tenet of English literature, and I do see it changing any time soon. Poor Liza! There are other good pieces at her site, many of them expressing disappointment with courses in English literature. Here’s a video of Libes on “100 books to read before you die”:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s going a-hunting:

Hili: I’m going hunting.
Andrzej: Be back before nightfall.

In Polish

Hili: Idę na łowy.
Ja: Wróć przed nocą.

*******************

From Funny and Strange Signs; they want you to pay the server’s hourly salary, too!:

From The Dodo Pet:

From Stacy:

Masih meets and hugs the Kurdish woman protestor blinded by the Iranian authorities. For some reason this video makes me tear up. They have a long hug and Masih puts a flower in the blind woman’s hair.

From Steve Stewart-Williams via Luana. I don’t really understand this huge disparity except that women get a break simply because they’re women:

The Number Ten Cat shows an old tradition:

I love moles. One of the traumatic experiences of my youth was seeing a guy on a golf course force one out of its hole with water and then killing it by hitting it on the head with a pipe.  I don’t care if it was on a golf course: it was alive!

I hope they get fed, too:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

And two from Dr. Cobb. He told me, about the first one, “Read the article—it’s a hoot, and terrifying!” I did and it was: the Neanderthals did root canals with stone tools and obviously no anesthesia. Oy, that must have hurt! They were tough indeed!

Tough bastards.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-05-13T18:16:19.154Z

And screwing up internationally:

My favourite phrases for when things go wrong…1. It’s a shitshow at the fuck factory (English)2. Now the turnips are cooked (Dutch)3. A donkey is inside another donkey (Persian)4. The Devil is loose in Salmonstreet (Danish)5. A finger in the ass and screaming everywhere (Brazilian Portuguese)

— Adam Sharp (@adamcsharp.bsky.social) 2026-05-13T16:12:33.034Z

Nicholas Kristof claims widespread sexual abuse of Palestinians by Israelis, including rape by trained dogs

May 13, 2026 • 9:45 am

A new Civil Commission on the October 7 Crimes Against Women and Children report, released Tuesday [The organization is Israeli, but some of the “principal contributors” were not], includes a 298-page pdf called “Silenced no more: the untold atrocities of October 7 and against hostages in captivity.” It includes description after description of horrific sexual violence enacted against the attendees at the Nova Festival, as well as on Israelis living near the border, and is hard to read. (You can see the Daily Mail summary here).  The Civil Commission is an independent Israeli investigative body, and investigated reports of assaults over a period two years

Nearly simultaneously with the report’s release—some say this is no coincidence—Nicholas Kristof wrote an op-ed for the NYT called  “The silence that meets the rape of Palestinians“, with the subtitle, “Male and female Palestinians describe brutal sexual abuse at the hands of Israel’s prison guards, soldiers, settlers and interrogators”. (His article is archived here.)  It is very long (it took up eight pages of 10-point type in Word when I printed it out) but is filed under “op-ed” rather than “news” or “news analysis”, though it is more a news piece than anything else. Kristof very briefly mentions his own views, but if his data were sound, I think the Times should have run some of his allegations as a separate news piece, for those allegations are startling.

But that’s no reason to dismiss Kristof’s claims. The sources need to be checked and verified, and any allegations that turn out to be true should be punished by Israel, as they have been before. (Of course Hamas doesn’t punish sexual brutality against Israelis, but in fact encourages it.)

Kristof says that Israel has been guilty of systematic sexual abuse against Palestinian men, women, and children, abuse that was known to but ignored by both Israeli and American officials. He also mentions a Euro-Med report on the same subject, which is linked in the comments below.

The question, then, is are Kristof’s allegations true? The Israelis at least had and photographed the bodies of victims for corroboration, but Kristof bases his evidence on hearsay, and he sought out the victims by asking around (something he later ignores when drawing conclusions). And there is no shortage of criticisms of his report, which I’ll link to below; many question the accuracy of the sources and/or accuse Kristof of being credulous. But first, read Kristof’s allegations. A summary:

. . . . in wrenching interviews, Palestinians have recounted to me a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children — by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards.

There is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes. But in recent years they have built a security apparatus where sexual violence has become, as a United Nations report put it last year, one of Israel’s “standard operating procedures” and “a major element in the ill treatment of Palestinians.” A report out last month, from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based advocacy group often critical of Israel, concludes that Israel employs “systematic sexual violence” that is “widely practiced as part of an organized state policy.”

. . . It’s impossible to know how common sexual assaults against Palestinians are. My reporting for this article is based on conversations with 14 men and women who said they had been sexually assaulted by Israeli settlers or members of the security forces. I also spoke to family members, investigators, officials and others.

. In many cases it was possible to corroborate the victims’ stories in part by talking to witnesses or, more commonly, to those whom the victims had confided in, such as family members, lawyers and social workers; in other cases it was not possible, perhaps because shame left people reluctant to acknowledge abuse even to loved ones.

Some examples of abuse (Kristof himself found 14). :

The Palestinians I interviewed recounted various kinds of abuse beyond rape. Many reported that they often had their genitals yanked or were beaten on the testicles. Hand-held metal detectors were used to probe between men’s naked legs and then smashed into their private parts; some men had to have their testicles amputated by doctors after beatings, according to the Euro-Med monitor.

One reason these abuses don’t receive more attention is threats by Israeli authorities, who periodically warn prisoners on release to keep quiet, according to Palestinians who have been freed. Another reason, Palestinian survivors told me, is that Arab society discourages discussing the topic for fear of hurting the morale of prisoners’ families and undermining the Palestinian narrative of defiant and heroic detainees.

. . . Most of the rape and other sexual violence has been directed at men, if only because Palestinian prisoners are more than 90 percent male. But I spoke to one Palestinian woman who was arrested at the age of 23 after the Hamas attack in October 2023. She said that the soldiers who arrested her threatened to rape her, her mother and her young niece. Her prison ordeal began with a strip-search conducted by female guards, “but then a male soldier came in, when I was completely naked,” she added.

For the next few days, she said, she was repeatedly stripped naked, beaten and searched by teams of male and female guards alike. The pattern was always the same: Several guards, men and women together, would come to her cell, forcibly strip her naked, handcuff her hands behind her back and bend her forward at the waist, sometimes forcing her head into the toilet. In this position, she would be beaten and groped all over, she said.

. . . “Israeli forces systematically employ rape and sexual torture to humiliate Palestinian female detainees,” the Euro-Med report said. It cited a 42-year-old woman who said she had been shackled naked to a metal table as Israeli soldiers forcibly had sex with her over two days while other soldiers filmed the attacks. Afterward, she said, she was shown photos of her being raped and told they would be published if she did not cooperate with Israeli intelligence.

If those photos still exist, they can be used as evidence.Some of the most shocking claims involve dog rape:

. . . .Some of the worst sexual abuse appears to have been directed at prisoners from Gaza. A Gaza journalist shared with me his account of the abuse he suffered after he was detained in 2024.

“No one escaped sexual assaults,” he said. “Not all were raped, I would say, but everyone went through humiliating, filthy sexual assaults.” On one occasion, he said, the guards zip-tied his testicles and penis for hours while beating his genitals. For days afterward, he said, he urinated blood.

On one occasion, he said, he was held down, stripped naked, and as he was blindfolded and handcuffed, a dog was summoned. With encouragement from a handler in Hebrew, he said, the dog mounted him.

Other Palestinian prisoners and human rights monitors have also cited reports of police dogs being coached to rape prisoners. The journalist said that when he was released, an Israeli official warned him: “If you want to stay alive when you return, do not speak to the media.”
Kristof has defended his allegations of dog rape on X, but the articles he cites appear to be examples of bestiality involving people using dogs for sexual satisfaction.  Here are some screenshots:

And according to Kristof, Palestinian children were not spared, either:

Multiple accounts indicate that sexual violence has been directed even at Palestinian children, who are typically imprisoned for throwing stones. I located and interviewed three boys who had been detained, and all described being sexually abused.

One, a shy boy in a Hilfiger shirt who was 15 years old at the time of his arrest, declined to say whether he had also witnessed actual rapes. But he said threats were routine: “They’d say, ‘Do this or we’ll put this stick up your butt.’”

There are claims that the sexual violence was systematic:

“Rampant sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners is a thing; it’s been normalized,” said Sari Bashi, an Israeli American human rights lawyer who is the executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel. “I don’t see evidence that it has been ordered. But there’s persistent evidence that the authorities know it’s happening and are not stopping it.”

Another Israeli lawyer, Ben Marmarelli, told me that based on the experiences of the Palestinian detainees he has represented, rape of Palestinian prisoners with objects “is going on across the board.”

Why Kristof finds the allegations credible:

Some may wonder whether Palestinians fabricated accusations of sexual assaults to defame Israel. To me that seems far-fetched, because none of those I interviewed sought me out or knew who else I was speaking to, and they were reluctant to speak. Yet there is some evidence that Israel’s sexual abuse has become so frequent that norms are changing and Palestinian victims are becoming a bit more willing to speak out.

Note, though, that he said earlier, “I found these victims by asking around among lawyers, human rights groups, aid workers and ordinary Palestinians themselves.” Thus they didn’t really seek him out to tell their stories, but were volunteered by organizations or individuals who knew of allegations.  These claims can’t both be true.

Sexual violence is especially horrible as humans, especially women, have evolved to choose with whom they mate, and forcible rape is a form of not only traumatizing physical violence, but also an odious abrogation of mate choice. And of course for men, who are embarrassed to admit they were sodomized, it can be equally humiliating.  The abrogation of choice in this manner is to me one way of understanding why sexual violence is considered more horrific than other types of physical violence.

At the end, Kristof gives his take, but it’s short compared to his recounting of the incidents:

Hamas has indeed brutally violated human rights. Israeli officials should look to their own violations as well — in particular at what a 49-page United Nations report last year called Israel’s “systematically” subjecting Palestinians to “sexualized torture” committed with at least “an implicit encouragement by the top civilian and military leadership.”

Think of it this way: The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on Oct. 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day. It persists because of silence, indifference and the failure of American and Israeli officials alike to answer Netanyahu’s query: Where the hell are you?

Although I’ve been generally sympathetic to Israel (as opposed to Hamas), I can’t simply dismiss Kristof’s report as made up.  Any Israeli committing sexual violence on others needs to be punished to the full extent of the law. I expect Israel will investigate Kristof’s claims, though that will be hard as many sources are anonymous or unwilling to go public.

In contrast, other news venues have sharply criticized Kristof’s report: Here are some links, though I can’t quote from all the articles:

The Israeli government responds in theTimes of Israel c

The Free Press

The National Review

The Hollywood Reporter (by Hen Mazzig)

A video by Haviv Rettig Gur

NGO Monitor

The Jerusalem Post

aish

And

the NYT stands by its report/

I’ll quote two: Eli Lake in the Free Press and the National Review article. First, though, a tweet sent me by Maarten Boudry.

If rape by trained dogs isn’t credible, what does that say about Kristof’s other claims? Did he not investigate the biology of his dog-rapist claims? There’s more below in Eli Lake’s piece:

And now quotes from Lake’s Free Press piece:

But Kristof engineered his piece to lend the scandalous claims more credibility than they deserve. He purported to have shared the abuse allegations with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and sought his reaction. “Do I believe it happens? Definitely,” Kristof recorded Olmert as saying. “There are war crimes committed every day in the territories.”

Yet Olmert later said that Kristof misrepresented their conversation. In a statement sent to The New York Times and obtained by The Free Press, Olmert said: “Mr. Kristof’s article includes claims of extraordinary gravity: that Israeli authorities have directed the rape of children, that dogs have been used as instruments of sexual assault, that systematic sexual torture is state policy. I did not validate these claims. I have no knowledge supporting these claims as I said to Mr. Kristof. Therefore, the positioning of my quote after pages of such allegations misrepresents my views.”

The story of trained rape dogs does not hold up. Let’s start with what is known about the biology of male dogs. Their penises are small and thin. They become erect only when they smell the pheromones of a female dog in heat. Brandon McMillan, the three-time Emmy-winning host of CBS’s Lucky Dog, who has spent 25 years training animals, told me he had never heard of a dog who was trained to rape a human being and doubted this was possible.

“When a female is in heat, the pheromones released carry it to the male canine,” McMillan said. “That’s how they reproduce and the miracle happens. I don’t see how you would train a dog to do that. The dog has to get turned on, for lack of a better word.”

Kristof claimed on X on Tuesday that “at least three different medical journal articles discuss rectal injuries in humans from anal penetration by dogs.” He did not provide links to those studies. There is one historical claim of a dog trained to rape prisoners. A German shepherd named Volodia was allegedly trained to rape female prisoners during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile at the Venda Sexy torture facility. This was reported by a Chilean truth-and-reconciliation commission based on the testimony of victims. These reports, however, do not account for how Volodia became erect in the absence of female dogs in heat.

Lake alleges that some of Kristof’s sources are connected to Hamas, but he does mention the credible story I mentioned above about the sexual abuse of a Palestinian prisoner. Unfortunately, the victim returned to Gaza and the IDF dropped the charges.

More:

Another problem with the report is that Kristof cites the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, which amplified the dog rape claims in April. The Switzerland-based organization purports to be a neutral human rights group, but it has a history of spreading libel against Israel, such as a November 2023 report that raised “concerns” that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was harvesting the organs of Palestinian corpses.

In 2013, Israel designated Euro-Med’s founder and current chairman Ramy Abdu as a Hamas operative in Europe. On the day after the October 7 massacre, Abdu posted on X: “In this battle, Palestine offered the elite of its youth and men on the path of freedom and dignity. Succeeding generations will remember you, and history will immortalize you as knightly heroes who forged for us a pure glory untainted by the mud. Preserve their names well, and teach the tales of their immortal valor to your children and grandchildren.”

. . .Was Kristof’s “journalist source” an example of a militant using a press affiliation as cover to advance his side in an information war?

To be sure, Kristof does include interviews with named victims who claim to have experienced sexual torture, which has been documented in Israel and many prisons throughout the world. Israel was rocked last year by the scandal of an alleged sexual torture at a detention facility known as Sde Teiman. Grainy and inconclusive video emerged in 2024 that appeared to show guards abusing a Palestinian prisoner.

Jonathan Conricus, a former IDF spokesman and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told me that he thinks the allegations that guards sexually abused a prisoner at Sde Teiman were credible. The problem, according to Conricus, is that the victim and witness to this abuse was allowed to return to Gaza, after which the IDF dropped the charges against the guards.

. . .“This is a story about how Israel was institutionally overwhelmed by events after October 7,” Conricus said. “So many terrorists infiltrated Israel on that day, there were too many to process, and reservists without the right training were called up to be prison guards.”

Conricus, however, said there was no evidence that sexual abuse was a systemic practice in Israeli jails as Euro-Med and Kristof claim. “There is no comparison to be made between terrorists who invaded a country, who raped, killed, and mutilated people, and the heavy-handed treatment by some Israeli guards against Palestinian terrorists who have been caught,” he said.

That is a vital distinction. Israel faces an enemy that filmed its atrocities on October 7 and celebrated the barbarism as an act of resistance. Now that same enemy is trying to persuade the world that Israel is no different than Hamas. Woe to any journalist credulous enough to believe them.

Finally, from the National Review‘s article by Brittany Bernstein: “Kristof’s extraordinary claims about Israeli rape require extraordinary evidence. The Times doesn’t have it.”

But media watchdogs have now raised questions about the integrity of the sourcing in the reported opinion column, which relies predominantly on claims from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor and several individuals with checkered backgrounds.

.. . . Euro-Med’s bias is obvious — it has “documented links to Hamas and a long record of extreme, unverified accusations against Israel,” according to HonestReporting, a pro-Israel media watchdog.

. . .Those unfounded accusations include that Israel was stealing organs from the bodies of dead Palestinians, that Israeli soldiers were executing patients in cold blood at al-Shifa Hospital, and, perhaps most notably, that Israeli forces have trained dogs to rape prisoners.

While Euro-Med first published the claim about dogs in 2024, the group issued a new report last month containing new detainee testimony making the same allegation, through the same unverified methodology, as Eli Kowaz writes in his own criticism of the Kristof piece.

And canine behavior expert Michael S. Gould tells National Review that the suggestion that dogs could be trained to rape prisoners is “absurd.”

“I’ve trained dogs to do a lot of things in my life. But no, that’s absurd,” said Gould, who began working with dogs in 1982 as one of the first members of the New York City Police Department’s Canine Unit and later went on to become a canine forensics expert and consultant. “It’s absurd for many reasons: the sexual instincts of dogs, their anatomy, the actual physical concept of it.”

. . .Kristof, in his piece, further writes that, “Palestinians have recounted to me a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children — by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards.”

But questions remain about the stories told by the few named sources in Kristof’s article.

Sami al-Sai, whom Kristof describes as a “freelance journalist,” says he was arrested because Israeli authorities hoped to pressure him into becoming an informant. “Because he prided himself on his journalistic professionalism, he said, he refused” to become an informant, Kristof reports.

However, al-Sai had previously been jailed in 2016 for incitement, the same charge he faced under his 2024 arrest. The charge is a criminal offense related to the publishing of material intended to encourage, support, or provoke violence or terrorism.

And al-Sai’s social media offers blatant evidence of his celebration of terrorism [Examples are given.]

. . .Kristof says it was another source, Issa Amro, who first sparked his interest in reporting on alleged sexual assaults against Palestinian prisoners. He says Amro, “a nonviolent activist sometimes called ‘the Palestinian Gandhi,’” told him that he had been sexually assaulted by Israeli soldiers and that he believed this was common but underreported because of shame.

But Amro initially said in February 2024, according to the Washington Post, that he was threatened with sexual assault during a ten-hour detention on October 7, 2023 — not that he was actually assaulted.

However, Kristof’s column describes Amro as a victim of sexual assault.

And the Israeli response (so far) as given in Bernstein’s article:

. . .Israel’s prison service told the Times it “categorically rejects the allegations” of sexual abuse.

And the Israeli Foreign Ministry called Kristof’s column “one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press.”

“In an unfathomable inversion of reality, and through an endless stream of baseless lies, propagandist Nicholas Kristof turns the victim into the accused,” the statement from the foreign ministry adds.

“Israel – whose citizens were the victims of the most horrific sexual crimes committed by Hamas on October 7, and whose hostages were later subjected to further sexual abuse – is portrayed as the guilty party,” the statement concludes. “This publication is no coincidence. It is part of a false and well-orchestrated anti-Israel campaign aimed at placing Israel on the UN Secretary-General’s blacklist.”

The ministry further accused the Times of purposefully timing the release of Kristof’s column to pull attention away from the findings of Israel’s Civil Commission to investigate Hamas’s systemic violence during, and since, the October 7 attack. The ministry said the commission approached the paper “months ago” about the planned release of the 300-page report, and that the Times “was not interested” in reporting it.

The report was released on Tuesday morning, one day after Kristof’s column was published. It found Hamas militants and their allies raped, assaulted, and sexually tortured their victims during and after the October 7, 2023, terror attack on southern Israel “to maximize pain and suffering.”

I don’t know if the timed publication of Kristof’s “J’accuse” column and the Civil Commission report were coincidental or planned, and I don’t much care. What happened are claims about reality, and should be verified, as far as they can, with evidence. And witnesses should be credible and not have given contradictory statements.  These are early days, and no doubt Kristof’s allegations will be investigated. For now, just read the allegations and the responses, and weigh in below if you have any thoughts.

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ a double take

May 13, 2026 • 8:15 am

The latest Jesus and Mo strip, called lead, says in one email that it’s new and in another that it’s old.  Well, I haven’t seen it, and the accompanying note says this:

A comparison that has been made before and is hard to ignore.

And consider subscribing or buying a book:

Why not become a patron of Jesus & Mo?:

Books are still available – The latest J&M collection of J&M strips, which has a foreword by Jerry Coyne, is available here:

And the strip, in which Mo is pretty close to having an epiphany:

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

May 13, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to a Hump Day (“ថ្ងៃ​ហ៊ុម” in Khmer): Wednesday, May 13, 2026 and Frog Jumping Day, inspired by Mark Twain’s 1865 story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, whose text you can find here.  The Caleveras County still celebrates the story with a competitive frog-jumping contest. You can see a summary below, but it looks a bit cruel, as the frogs have to be scared to jump. (The record, which nabs the yearly $20,000 prize for a first place, is a bit more than 21 feet in three jumps.)

It’s also Cough Drop Day, International Hummus Day, Leprechaun Day, National Apple Pie Day, National Fruit Cocktail Day, Tulip Day, and World Cocktail Day (the Rusty Nail, a mixture of Scotch and Drambuie, was a favorite of Frank Sinatra). Here’s a lovely hummus meal, complete with pita and falafel, that I ate three years ago in Jerusalem:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 13 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*I don’t know why the rise in inflation is headline news, but it is in both the WSJ and the Washington Post From the WSJ: “Inflation soared to 3.8% in April, driven by gasoline prices.”

There’s a graph from the Labor Department:

An excerpt:

Consumer prices rose 3.8% in April from a year earlier, a clear impact of higher gas prices since the start of the war with Iran.

The Numbers

The figures, reported Tuesday by the Labor Department, surpassed the previous month’s reported increase of 3.3%. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had expected inflation of 3.7%. The April increase was the highest in three years.

Prices excluding food and energy categories—the so-called core measure economists watch in an effort to better capture inflation’s underlying trend—rose 2.8%. That compared with forecasts for a 2.7% increase, and was a pickup from 2.6% the previous month.

The Big Picture:

High and rising prices have become a flashpoint for Americans, who had expected the steep inflation that hit the U.S. right after the pandemic to be off their plates by now. Price increases have been especially sharp for some items that people buy all the time, like coffee and gas.

Some economists said that the tariffs that President Trump announced a year ago are still slowly filtering through to some goods—but the Iran war, layered on top of that, has presented a much quicker and more obvious shock that could be hard to reverse.

“The American economy has entered a new chapter where inflation appears to have stepped up,” says Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM. He predicts the headline rate moving to 4% later this year. “Median American families are going to find it very challenging to adjust going into the second half of the year.”

The 10% is an arbitrary figure for the onset of a “recession,” but the severity of price increases is lower than in 2022-2023. I know I”m entitled and not worried about being poor, but I wonder what the oppressed people of Iran, yearning to breathe free, think when they hear that America may pull out of the war because prices here are too high.

*Speaking of inflation, Trump declares that he wants to pause the federal gasoline tax, which will reduce the price of gas by a huge 18¢ per gallon. The WaPo analyzes what it will mean and who supports or opposes it.

President Donald Trump has proposed pausing the federal gas tax as a form of relief for American consumers as energy prices soar as a result of the war in Iran.

The move — which requires congressional approval to pass — would mark the latest in a string of government interventions to address fallout from the war, which is weighing on Trump’s popularity.

Since the war began in late February, the price of a barrel of Brent crude oil, an international benchmark, has skyrocketed from about $70 to more than $107. U.S. gas prices — now an average of $4.50 a gallon — have reached levels not seen since 2022 and contributed to Trump’s falling approval ratings ahead of the November midterms.

So is a pause on the federal gas tax likely to happen, and would it make a difference to the price you pay at the pump? Here’s what to know.

The answer to the two questions are “probably” and “a little, but not much.”

Prices at the pump incorporate a mixture of federal and state taxes, meaning they can vary sharply between states. The federal tax is 18.3 cents per gallon on gasoline and 24.3 cents per gallon on diesel fuel, as well as a “leaking underground storage tank” fee of 0.1 cents per gallon on both fuels, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

State taxes vary, with a national average of 32.6 cents on gasoline and 34.8 cents on diesel, according to the EIA. Factors such as the type of taxes added, where the gas comes from and the ingredients in it can also affect prices, which change daily. The Gulf Coast and southeastern states had the lowest prices in 2024, The Post has reported, partially because of their proximity to refineries.

On Monday, Trump proposed suspending the federal tax for an unspecified period, saying prices would “drop like a rock” once the war ended. Also that day, the Energy Department said it would release 53 million barrels of crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The Trump administration had agreed to release a total of 172 million barrels as part of a contribution to the International Energy Agency’s effort to stabilize oil prices, the Energy Department said.

The administration has also lifted restrictions on ships moving fuel between U.S. ports, eased pollution rules regarding ethanol and temporarily waived sanctions on Russian oil. Some states, including Georgia, Utah, Kentucky and Indiana, have moved to suspend or reduce gas taxes in response to rising costs, as have countries such as Canada, Australia and India, according to the IEA.

Ultimately, a great deal hinges on whether or when fuel and commodities resume flowing through the Persian Gulf. If they do, the inflation arithmetic gets easier in a hurry because officials don’t have to worry about second-round effects of higher energy prices and product shortages.
I’m curious to see whether the price cuts will be approved by Congress, or if conservatives of progressive Democrats will balk at the $18 billion a five-month suspension will cost the government (that money goes for highway and transportation improvements). Voting against a temporary reduction won’t help a party in this fall’s elections.

*Reader Norm linked to this tweet in a comment, and calls it “a good analysis that goes against much of the tide about the war. It’s really a long tweet by military expert John Spencer, and worth reading: “Who has the upper hand in Iran?” Some excerpts

One of the strangest habits in modern war analysis is how quickly survival gets confused with victory. Iran has not collapsed overnight. The regime still broadcasts threats, launches missiles and drones, and floods television and social media with declarations of imagined strength. From that surface-level reality, a growing chorus of commentators has rushed to claim that Iran has embarrassed the United States, exposed Israeli weakness, and seized control of escalation through its ability to threaten the Strait of Hormuz. Much of that analysis mistakes continued existence for strategic success and ignores nearly every measurable indicator of national power.

Wars are not scored like debates on cable television. They are judged through military capability, economic endurance, political cohesion, freedom of action, strategic leverage, and the ability to sustain power while degrading an opponent’s. By those standards, Iran is substantially weaker today than it was before the war began. The United States and Israel still hold the upper hand because the foundations of Iranian power have been systematically reduced in ways that will take years to rebuild, if they can be rebuilt at all.

The scale of military destruction alone is extraordinary. Much of the senior leadership structure that spent decades constructing Iran’s regional military network is dead. Senior IRGC commanders, missile force leaders, intelligence officials, nuclear scientists, operational planners, and even the Supreme Leader himself have been eliminated. Mohammad Bagheri, Hossein Salami, and other senior figures who represented the institutional backbone of Iran’s military strategy are gone. Entire command relationships were shattered during the opening phases of the war, leaving surviving leaders scrambling to maintain continuity while under constant pressure.

The damage extends far beyond personnel losses. Nuclear facilities that represented decades of investment and strategic ambition now sit buried under rubble after sustained strikes on enrichment sites, underground complexes, centrifuge production facilities, research centers, and supporting infrastructure. Analysts continue to speak as though Iran can simply restart enrichment at industrial scale in a matter of months. That misunderstands what was destroyed. Advanced centrifuge production depends on precision manufacturing, specialized tooling, secure facilities, trained personnel, supply chains, and protected infrastructure. Large portions of that ecosystem no longer exist.

Spencer goes on to sum up the damage Iran has suffered, and then concludes this way:

. . . Many analysts want to simplify a deeply complex war into slogans. Iran is winning. America is losing. Trump is trapped. Those narratives often avoid confronting the measurable destruction Iran has suffered, the years required to rebuild its military-industrial base, and the strategic value of preventing a terrorist regime from reaching a no-turning-back threshold in nuclear weapons capability and missile production. They also dismiss the importance of preserving freedom of navigation, protecting regional partners, and degrading a state that spent decades funding terrorism and destabilizing the Middle East.

No one can predict the future with certainty. No analyst possesses a crystal ball capable of forecasting whether the Islamic regime can survive the long-term political and economic consequences of this war. But based on every serious measure of national power, Iran is weaker today than before the conflict began. Its military has been shattered across multiple domains. Its economy is under severe strain. Its proxies are degraded. Its deterrence credibility has suffered. Its strategic ambitions have been rolled back. The United States and its partners still hold the upper hand because the foundations of Iranian power have been systematically reduced, and rebuilding them may take far longer than many observers are willing to admit.

Yes, but when they rebuild they can still make nuclear weapons, export terror, and oppress the Iranian people.  Is that what we call a “win”?

*In the NYT’s morning newsletter, not on the paper’s website, Sam Sifton discusses the issue who owns the Strait of Hormuz.  The narrowest point of the strait is 24 mi (39 km) with Iran on one side and Oman on the other.

Scholars have argued for centuries that no state can lay claim to the high seas, the ocean common. One jurist from the Dutch Golden Age came up with a term for it: mare liberum, or free sea.

Which is fine out in the middle of an ocean. It gets a little more complicated closer to shore, and particularly with choke points like the Strait of Hormuz. For decades, the United States has argued that it has a right to freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran, in contrast, has said that it can regulate traffic there.

By what right? Can a nation declare the waters off its coastline as its own? How far out do those waters extend?

I picked up some light reading: “Legal Vortex in the Strait of Hormuz,” a 2014 paper by James Kraska, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College. It could have been written much more recently — like, in February. We spoke yesterday. Kraska has seen this conflict coming for more than a decade.

What’s going on in the strait is fundamentally a legal dispute, he told me. The U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, a kind of international constitution for the oceans, governs passage there. Neither Washington nor Tehran has ratified it, but it reflects “customary international law,” which means it is still supposed to be binding, Kraska told me.

In other words, Iran can claim that its territorial waters extend 12 nautical miles from its shoreline, which is permitted by the treaty, but only if it recognizes the right of free navigation through those waters. (Free navigation, Kraska noted. Charging a toll, as Iran hopes to do, would break the law.)

Kraska told me about a similar conflict between Britain and Albania in the late 1940s, over the channel between Greece and the island of Corfu. In an effort to control that strait, Albania fired on Royal Navy warships. Mines in the strait killed dozens of sailors. It didn’t lead to war. The case became the first one adjudicated by the International Court of Justice. It ruled that Britain enjoyed the right to sail through and that Albania had a duty to keep the strait clear of mines.

Albania, a less powerful nation than Iran, complied. The precedent may end there.

It looks like what Iran is claiming is illegal, at least according to the UN’s dicta.  But don’t expect Iran to obey that law.

*Many universities have land acknowledgements, but few do anything more than say they exist on stolen land. But a few have gone further, trying to give reparations to the Native Americans whom they say they displaced (sometimes, though, they didn’t “displace” anyone).  Harvard was one of those that tried, but it turned into a mess, as described in the new FP article, “How Harvard’s reparation plan flopped.”

[In 2019] Harvard University took up the cause when Harvard president Lawrence Bacow convened a faculty committee to excavate the university’s historical involvement in the Atlantic slave trade.

The committee, chaired by Harvard Radcliffe Institute dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin, ultimately produced a 134-page report confirming the ugly truth that Harvard, like many institutions in the North, was run by slaveowners—among them four university presidents—and that its professors had advanced so-called race science, including eugenics, to justify the trade.

The report, issued in 2022, called on the school to “take responsibility for its past” and “leverage its strengths in the pursuit of meaningful repair.”

The university then established what it called the “Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative,” which aimed to “remedy harms to descendants, to our community and the nation, and to campus life and learning.” It committed an extraordinary $100 million to the initiative and promoted Sara Bleich, a professor of public health policy, to vice provost for special projects to shepherd the effort.

What followed was a cascade of institutional embarrassments: high-profile resignations, the dismissal of an entire research team, a string of HR complaints, and a rebuke from Antigua’s ambassador to the United States. And so far at least, its signature effort—to find descendants of people Harvard had enslaved and then do something for them, presumably financially—has failed miserably.

Harvard, of course, was hardly unique among universities in launching an ambitious racial justice project in the late 2010s and early 2020s. But in its scope and cost, its undertaking surpassed anything adopted by its Ivy League peers. The nine-figure initiative was billed as “unprecedented.”

And so was its failure. In retrospect, that should hardly have been a surprise. Like other battle cries that emerged in the past decade—Black Lives Matter or Defund the Police, for instance—the idea of reparations, whatever its merits, struggled to offer a defined, achievable outcome. And even Harvard, with its $57 billion endowment, couldn’t square that contradiction.

Not everything that came out of the Harvard initiative was a failure. The 2022 report put forth seven recommendations. The more straightforward ones included forging partnerships with historically black colleges and universities (HCBUs), and developing educational opportunities for marginalized youth. In early 2024, it established the Du Bois Scholars Program, which offers summer research internships at Harvard to students from select HBCUs, and it has funded job readiness programs for unemployed adults in Cambridge and Boston.

Beyond that, positive results were hard to come by.

The problem is that for Harvard there could be 30,000 descendants of slaves held by people associated with the University.

The reckoning that Harvard once promised has since morphed into something the university may not be able to achieve. If the number of living descendants indeed reaches 30,000, Harvard’s $100 million commitment works out to $3,333 per person before a dollar is spent on the rest of the initiative’s ambitious projects. Should the university seriously fulfill its pledge of “engagement,” which includes “educational support,” the math becomes difficult: At Harvard, for example, a four-year degree costs upward of $380,000.

Harvard is “already hedging” its initiative, and any meaningful reparations are not going to happen. Still, there’s a better case for reparations for slavery than there is for reparations for “occupying Native American land” given that we don’t know the entire history of early American tribes or prehistoric settlers. However, I’ve never heard a convincing argument about why people like me, whose ancestors were in Eastern Europe during slavery and had no connection with the odious institution, should pay for what Americans did from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili likes her dinosaurs bite-sized:

Hili: Dinosaurs adorned themselves with feathers.
Andrzej: But thank goodness, they ended up smaller.

In Polish:

Hili: Dinozaury przystroiły się w piórka.
Ja: Ale na całe szczęście zmalały.

*******************

From Funny and Strange Signs:

From The Dodo Pet; a Limulus costume:

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

Masih highlights an Iranian protestor who lost both eyes when the authorities shot her in the face. The video is six minutes long with English subtitles. If you can’t see the tweet below (for some reason it’s unembeddable), go to the site and video here.

From Luana (who got her Ph.D. at Cornell); a group at the school whose sole purpose seems to be causing disruption to further their ideology:

I found this optical illusion on X. Yes, the lines are straight.

From Emma. To be sure, I don’t mind being reclined on without the recliner asking me:

One from my feed:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was not yet one year old, and would have been 83 had she lived.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-05-13T10:35:40.545Z

. . . and two from Dr. Cobb. First, sound up to hear this porcupine:

Up-close with Ozzy chomping on a lemon slice and some yams. Sound on! 🔊📹: Prehensile-tailed porcupine by zookeepers Brooke and Elsa

— Zoo Boise (@zooboise.bsky.social) 2026-05-11T14:26:21.665Z

A “sea angel”: a gorgeous predatory sea slug:

Witness the mesmerizing sea angel (*Clione* sp.), a real-life creature gliding beneath the ice of the White Sea. Captured by Alexander Semenov, this beauty is no illusion.

— Digital Brain (@yourdigitalbrain.bsky.social) 2026-05-12T06:11:46.000Z