Link Roundup November/December 2023

House Republicans aim to pay for Israel aid with cuts to IRS funds

The bill would send $14.3 billion to Israel without addressing funding requests for the war in Ukraine. Johnson's new bill would pay for the spending with $14.5 billion in cuts to the long-understaffed Internal Revenue Service.

The US has strongly backed Israel’s war against Hamas. The allies don’t seem to know what comes next

A paper released by Israel’s Intelligence Ministry, which conducts research for the government, looked at a number of long-term scenarios, none of which included Palestinian statehood. Instead, it described a return of Abbas’ Palestinian Authority to Gaza as the worst option — saying it would give an “unprecedented victory to the Palestinian national movement, a victory that would cost the lives of thousands of Israeli civilians and soldiers and not guarantee Israel’s security. Likewise, it said the possibility of cultivating an alternative leadership in Gaza suffered from major shortcomings — including a lack of deterrence and the risk of renewed violence. Its preferred option was a mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza into neighboring Egypt — a scenario that the Palestinians and Egypt have ruled out and that could destroy Israel’s fragile relations with Egypt.

An Israeli ministry, in a ‘concept paper,’ proposes transferring Gaza civilians to Egypt’s Sinai

The document is dated Oct. 13, six days after Hamas militants killed more than 1,400 people in southern Israel and took over 240 hostage in an attack that provoked a devastating Israeli war in Gaza. It was first published by Sicha Mekomit, a local news site.

Israeli influencers mock Palestinian detainees being tortured with children’s music in new TikTok trend

Palestinian writer Muhammed Shehada wrote on X Tuesday that the video had turned into a TikTok challenge and shared a news clip of an Israeli anchorman calling the song “Israel’s secret weapon.”

UnitedHealth uses AI model with 90% error rate to deny care, lawsuit alleges

According to the Stat investigation and the lawsuit, the estimates are often draconian. For instance, on a Medicare Advantage Plan, patients who stay in a hospital for three days are typically entitled to up to 100 days of covered care in a nursing home. But with nH Predict, patients rarely stay in nursing homes for more than 14 days before receiving payment denials from UnitedHealth. When patients or their doctors have requested to see nH Predict's reports, UnitedHealth has denied their requests, telling them the information is proprietary, according to the lawsuit. And, when prescribing physicians disagree with UnitedHealth's determination of how much post-acute care their patients need, their judgments are overridden.

The Census Bureau wants to change how it asks about disabilities. Some advocates don’t like it

Under the proposed change, respondents would be allowed to answer most of the same questions with four choices: “no difficulty,” “some difficulty,” “a lot of difficulty” and “cannot do at all.” There are tweaks to the language of the questions, and the proposal adds a query on whether respondents have trouble communicating. But the most significant change involves the threshold beyond which people are determined to have a disability. The international standards being considered by the Census Bureau typically define a person as having a disability if they answer “cannot do at all” or “a lot of difficulty” for any task or function. During testing last year by the Census Bureau, the percentage of respondents who were defined as having a disability went from 13.9% using the current questions to 8.1% under the international standards. When the definition was expanded to also include “some difficulty,” it grew to 31.7%.

Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies

It’s always valuable to hear the reverent tones with which American elites speak of their monsters. When the Kissingers of the world pass, their humanity, their purpose, their sacrifices are foremost in the minds of the respectable. American elites recoiled in disgust when Iranians in great numbers took to the streets to honor one of their monsters, Qassem Soleimani, after a U.S. drone strike executed the Iranian external security chief in January 2020. Soleimani, whom the United States declared to be a terrorist and killed as such, killed far more people than Timothy McVeigh. But even if we attribute to him all the deaths in the Syrian Civil War, never in Soleimani’s wildest dreams could he kill as many people as Henry Kissinger. Nor did Soleimani get to date Jill St. John, who played Bond girl Tiffany Case in Diamonds Are Forever.