Florida & Beyond, and All Opinions

For the wounded, injured and sick in Gaza, there is seemingly no escape. On Oct. 17, 2023, news broke that at least 500 patients, staff and people seeking shelter from Israeli bombs had been killed in an explosion at a hospital, according to health authorities in the Hamas-run enclave. It amounts to a devastating loss of life during a campaign of bombing that has not spared the frail or sick.

In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks by al-Qaida on the United States, President George W. Bush made an expansive pledge to end terrorism. It didn’t work out so well. As Israel pursues its response to the Hamas attack, the Israeli government would be well advised to remember the past two decades of often indecisive warfare conducted by both the United States and Israel against insurgent and terrorist groups.

Prioritizing physical fitness and health as you get older can help you go through your normal day-to-day routine without feeling physically exhausted at the end of the day. It can also help you continue to have special memories with your family and loved ones that you might not have been able to have if you weren’t physically active.

International aid groups now face the same problem in Gaza that local businesses and residents have encountered for about 16 years: a blockade that prevents civilians and items, like medicine from easily moving into or out of the enclosed area, roughly 25 miles long. That 16-year blockade did not apply to the food and fuel that groups brought in to Gaza. Now, it does.

While much of the political discourse surrounding the ban of supervised injection sites has focused on protecting neighborhoods where drug activity happens in parks and on the streets, ample evidence suggests that banning supervised injection sites may instead jeopardize the people and communities the policy was intended to protect.

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics has been awarded to 90 men since 1969 and just three women. The third woman to win the prize, distinguished Harvard labor economist Claudia Goldin, was honored on Oct. 9, 2023, for her decades of work studying the gender pay gap. It wasn’t a victory just for her but for women in the field.

How did Gaza become one of the most densely populated parts of the planet? And why is it the home to militant Palestinian action now? Understanding the answers to those questions provides crucial historical context to the current violence.

Analysts are suggesting that Tehran’s fingerprints can be seen on the surprise attack on Israel. At the very least, Iran’s leaders have reacted to the assault with encouragement and support.

Prominent Iranian women’s rights advocate Narges Mohammadi has won the 2023 Nobel peace prize for her long fight against the oppression of women in Iran. Mohammadi is serving multiple prison sentences in Evin prison in Tehran on charges which include spreading propaganda against the state.

On issues where the Christian right’s First Amendment claims directly threaten the equal citizenship of sexual minorities, the court leaves no question about which side it’s on, privileging Christians over all others.

The House of Representatives did something that had never been done before in the nation’s history: It ousted the speaker of the House. Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, lost his job in a vote of 216 to 210. Charles R. Hunt of Boise State University’s School of Public Servic offers a sense of what this historic development might mean for the government at the moment, as well as for American democracy over the longer term.

The Covid vaccines would not have been possible it if weren’t for the pioneering work of this year’s winners of the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine decades earlier: Dr Katalin Karikó and Dr Drew Weissman, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, for their discoveries into mRNA biology. The pair were the first to discover a way of modifying mRNA that allowed it to successfully be delivered to cells and replicated by them.

An estimated 1 in 6 Americans (or 48 million people) get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die from foodborne diseases every year. A microbiologist outlines what to look for and what to avoid to not end up poisoned.

The world’s oldest democracy currently has its oldest-ever Congress. President Joe Biden (80 years old) is also the oldest US president in history. His leading rival in the 2024 presidential race, former President Donald Trump, is not far behind at 77. They’re both older than 96% of the US population. Ron DeSantis thinks the founders would have had a maximum age limits on elected officials if they “could look at this again.” But why didn’t they?