Tangle - The explosion at a Gaza hospital.

Episode Date: October 19, 2023

The Gaza hospital explosion. On Tuesday, reports broke that the al-Ahli Arab Hospital, founded in 1882 by the Anglican church, had been the site of a major explosion. The hospital has about 80 beds, b...ut was being used to house civilians during Israel's aerial bombardment of Gaza. Video footage reviewed by The New York Times showed “scores of bodies strewn across the hospital’s courtyard,” suggesting a high death toll from the explosion. Initially, news outlets reported that more than 500 civilians had been killed in an Israeli strike, citing the Palestinian Health Ministry, which is controlled by Hamas.You can watch the video referenced in “My Take” here.You can read today's podcast ⁠⁠here⁠⁠, today’s Under the Radar story ⁠⁠here⁠⁠, and today’s “Have a nice day” story ⁠⁠here⁠⁠. You can also check out our latest YouTube videos, a recording of the “My Take” from Tuesday’s Israel piece ⁠⁠here⁠⁠ and an interview with Christopher Dowling-Magill about conversion therapy here.Today’s clickables: Quick hits (1:15), Today’s story (3:15), Right’s take (8:32), Left’s take (12:38), Isaac’s take (16:34), Listener question (23:38), Under the Radar (24:08), Numbers (24:57), Have a nice day (26:14)You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and edited by Jon Lall. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.
Starting point is 00:01:00 From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place where you get news from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of Isaac's take. I am your host for today, John Law, and today we are going to be talking about the explosion at the Al-Ahly Hospital in Gaza. This is a horrific tragedy and has been a complex situation to assess, due in no small part to the difficulties in reporting and trying to get accurate information. It's been an absolute mess on social media with massive amounts of speculation and misinformation, and we are going to do our best today to present what information is available. Before we get to our story, as always, we'll start off today with some quick hits. First up, Representative Jim Jordan, the Republican from Ohio, lost another bid to
Starting point is 00:02:18 become Speaker on Wednesday after receiving two fewer votes than he did on Tuesday. Republicans are planning to back Patrick McHenry, the Republican from North Carolina, as interim speaker until January. Number two, former President Donald Trump and the judge overseeing his civil fraud trial had a tense exchange yesterday after Trump disrupted testimony and was warned to lower his voice. warned to lower his voice. Number three, X, formerly known as Twitter, is going to start testing a new subscription service that charges a $1 annual fee for unverified users. Number four, the Islamic Resistance, an Iran-backed militant group, claimed responsibility for three drone attacks targeting US military bases in Iraq. And number five, in a deal with prosecutors, former Trump lawyer Sidney
Starting point is 00:03:05 Powell pleaded guilty to criminal charges stemming from the Georgia election interference case. A major development and breaking right now in Gaza. The Palestinian health ministry says as many as 300 people were killed after a strike on a hospital in central Gaza. They go on to say there were as many as 500 victims in all. The Israeli military says it is investigating just what happened. We're learning more today about that explosion at a Gaza City hospital, which killed hundreds of innocent people, according to Palestinian officials. The U.S. says there is evidence that Israel was not responsible for that blast. Israel categorically denies it was involved. And an American official tells CBS News the U.S. has its own intelligence, which gives it high confidence that Israel was not responsible.
Starting point is 00:04:04 Based on the information we've seen to date, it appears the result of an errant rocket fired by a terrorist group in Gaza. On Tuesday, reports broke that the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, founded in 1882 by the Anglican Church, had been the site of a major explosion. The hospital has about 80 beds, but was being used to house civilians during Israel's aerial bombardment of Gaza. Video footage reviewed by the New York Times showed scores of bodies
Starting point is 00:04:33 strewn across the hospital's courtyard, suggesting a high death toll from the explosion. Initially, news outlets reported more than 500 civilians had been killed in an Israeli airstrike, citing the Palestinian Health Ministry, which is controlled by Hamas. Israel responded to the accusations by saying it was investigating the explosion and hours later denied responsibility. Instead, the Israeli Defense Force said the explosion appeared to be the result of a misfired rocket from within Gaza, which the IDF blamed on the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or PIJ, the second largest armed group in Gaza. On social media, speculation about the blast was
Starting point is 00:05:12 rampant, as few foreign correspondents or local reporters are on the ground in Gaza to provide accurate information. That Israel had been behind the strike was not hard to fathom, given that 15 hospitals in Gaza have already been damaged during the last two weeks and Israel had warned several hospitals in northern Gaza to evacuate including al-Ahli. Initial reports of the strike came after dark in Gaza and as day broke satellite images and drone footage revealed that the hospital which was initially reported as leveled was still standing. BBC published one of the most comprehensive reports on the blast after a field reporter got access to the hospital, which had been limited to foreign journalists.
Starting point is 00:05:52 They reported that, based on available evidence, it appears the explosion happened in a courtyard which is part of the hospital site after the blast did not show significant damage to surrounding hospital buildings. Independent war crime analyst Mark Garlasco stated that the explosion was not an airstrike. Quds News Network released a photo of the blast site showing the hospital still standing but with a few destroyed cars and a damaged parking lot. Open source analysts like Nathan Rooser, who worked for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, began to coalesce around a belief that the photo evidence did not suggest an
Starting point is 00:06:24 Israeli airstrike. Reusser shared an extensive thread on X explaining that the images shared were not consistent with an airstrike or a civilian casualty count of over 500, adding that some vehicles within 10 meters of the point of impact did not appear damaged. Other researchers have rejected this hypothesis arguing that Israel uses small enough munitions to have caused the destruction, and pointing out that the same hospital had already been damaged by a separate Israeli bombing on October 14th. However, the rapid proliferation of responses has caused some confusion and helped spread misinformation. For instance, Hananya Naftali, an Israeli influencer, initially celebrated the explosion and credited it to an Israeli
Starting point is 00:07:05 airstrike. Many social media accounts falsely claimed Naftali was a member of the Israeli government and when his tweet was deleted, accused Israel of orchestrating a cover-up. Similarly, a user on X with a profile named Farida Khan claimed to be an Al Jazeera reporter who witnessed the strike and said Hamas was behind it and that Al Jazeera, a Qatari-funded media outlet, was covering it up. But the account was fake. No such reporter exists, as Al Jazeera later confirmed. The tweets were shared thousands of times before the account was shut down. At the same time, the official Israeli government account released videos claiming to show the
Starting point is 00:07:41 rocket launches from Gaza responsible for the blast, but at least one of the videos had the wrong timestamp for the explosion and was then removed after a New York Times journalist pointed out the discrepancy. Finally, Israel released audio recordings purporting to show Hamas militants confessing to the strike, but the United Kingdom-based Channel 4 News has published reports suggesting the recordings were fake. The initial reporting that over 500 civilians had been killed by an Israeli airstrike sent waves of outrage through the Arab world. Protests broke out at U.S. and Israeli embassies across the Middle East,
Starting point is 00:08:15 and leaders from Palestine, Egypt, and Jordan canceled meetings with President Biden. Meanwhile, Biden and U.S. officials have cast a doubt on claims that the strike came from Israel, saying their intelligence strongly suggests a rocket misfire from inside Gaza. Regardless of who is responsible for the strike on the hospital, the civilian toll in Gaza continues to mount. While the death toll of over 3,000 Palestinians has not been independently verified, reports from journalists and humanitarian groups of civilian deaths on the ground have been constant over the last week. Israel's bombardment of northern Gaza is expected to precede a full-fledged ground invasion, and around one million people have been displaced, with the humanitarian situation declining rapidly. Reporting from
Starting point is 00:08:58 the ground has shown throngs of desperate civilians waiting in line for food and water, or looking for places to shelter in southern Gaza. Today, we're going to take a look at some opinion pieces from the United States about the explosion in Gaza and the state of the war, and then Isaac's take. First, we're going to start out with what the right is saying. The right is confident that Israel was not behind the strike and argues the mainstream media is responsible for spreading a false narrative before it had the full facts. Some say this faulty reporting is typical of journalists who care more about pushing an agenda than finding the truth. Others say the entire episode
Starting point is 00:09:49 serves as a reminder that the US must unequivocally support Israel in this war. In The Federalist, John Daniel Davidson said the corporate media are waging an information war regurgitating Hamas's propaganda. What happened here? This was an info op, a deliberate campaign to alter the narrative of the Israel-Hamas war and inflame the Muslim world. Perhaps a billion people or more are now convinced beyond all doubt that Israel bombed a hospital and killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians, Davidson wrote. We've seen this kind of op before many times. In every case, it's designed to serve the domestic interest of the progressive left. In this case, the purpose was to constrain Israel's
Starting point is 00:10:29 response to last weekend's horrific Hamas attacks on innocent Israeli civilians. It's important to understand that these media info ops only happen on issues where the reporting biases serve the domestic political priorities of the left. From Ukraine to Gaza to the streets of American cities, the reporting bias works in the same direction and serves the same set of interests. The connections and affinity between BLM activists and the pro-Palestinian crowd in the U.S. should be fairly obvious by now, and we should understand these media ops in that light, Davidson said. By repeating Hamas propaganda, they are effectively waging war against Israel,
Starting point is 00:11:04 and said. By repeating Hamas propaganda, they are effectively waging war against Israel, but they are doing so in part of a larger information war to advance their agenda in the United States. In the Washington Examiner, Zachary Faria criticized the mainstream media for botching the hospital story. The best case scenario here is that these outlets assume that the Gaza health ministry, which is run by the very same Hamas terrorists who just raped, kidnapped, and slaughtered Israeli civilians, would never dare lie to them. Journalists at those outlets treated the anti-Semitic animals that make up Hamas as trustworthy sources and then raced to put out stories quickly without checking any facts. Again, that is the best case scenario, Farias said.
Starting point is 00:11:42 Whatever you think the answer is, it is clear that the media outlets do not deserve the benefit of the doubt. This wasn't an innocent mistake or typo. This was a conscious decision to parrot terrorist talking points and present it as news. At best, their standard for journalism is in the gutter, in which case they deserve your utter contempt for posturing as your moral superiors on disinformation. Given the years-long media crusade to defend or contextualize Palestinian terrorism against Jews, you should not be expected to assume that the best-case scenario is the only accurate one here. The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote about Hamas's hospital lie and the laws
Starting point is 00:12:20 of war. President Biden's speech in Israel Wednesday told the world two truths that it needed to hear. The tragic deaths at Zadigaza Hospital were caused by a Palestinian rocket, and the U.S. hasn't wavered in its solidarity with Israel. The president kept the focus where it should be, on Hamas's gross violations of the laws of war. These are now being misconstrued to tie Israel's hands with consequences for the West at large, the board said. Hamas may still call this a success. An angry mob took to the Ramallah streets to protest Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, for not doing enough to help Hamas. The Western left has been moving to a standard that any civilian casualties in war are too many. If that is the law of war, then Israel would be denied the right to defend itself to destroy an enemy embedded in schools, mosques, or dense urban neighborhoods. Under that standard,
Starting point is 00:13:10 no Western nation, including the U.S., would be able to strike back against terrorists if civilians might be killed. Those aren't the laws of war. They're the laws of Western unilateral disarmament. Israel deserves U.S. support for its much-lied-about way of war, in addition to its just cause. All right, that is it for what the right is saying, which brings us to what the left is saying. The left mostly accepts the evidence offered by the US and Israel that the strike came from a Palestinian group, but the reaction to the latest information is mixed. Some say the incident increases the risk of broader regional conflict no matter who's
Starting point is 00:13:55 responsible. Others argue that Israeli intelligence has lied before and the public should not take their claims at face value. In Bloomberg, Mark Champion said the hospital strike escalates war risk, no matter who's to blame. Tuesday's events have brought escalation of the conflict closer, narrowing the space for caution and compromise and increasing support across the region for other state and non-state actors to pile in, should Israel launch its expected grand invasion. No matter what evidence emerges to the contrary, popular opinion across much of the world, especially the Muslim world, will remain convinced that Israel killed more than 500 people in a deliberate and heinous attack on a hospital which amounts to a war crime.
Starting point is 00:14:37 A second certainty is that there will be more such tragedies for Palestinian non-combatants, and therefore public relations disasters for Israel if and when it begins its ground attack. The international response already shows that Israel's stock response, the arguments that Hamas bears ultimate responsibility and that all wars involve collateral damage, has already lost any power it had to persuade, Champion wrote. Finally, this is the result of Palestinian civilians being cynically used as pawns as they have been so often in the intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In Slate, Fred Kaplan explained how the hospital explosion upended Biden's diplomacy efforts.
Starting point is 00:15:19 Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, Town is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca. The blast was initially blamed on Israel, but it was more likely a terrible accident caused,
Starting point is 00:16:22 it now seems, by an errant rocket fired by Islamic Jihad, an Iranian-backed militia that occasionally allies with Hamas, Kaplan said. No matter, in the hours between the initial charge and the release of evidence to the contrary, thousands of enraged protesters across the Middle East took to the streets, and even moderate Arab heads of state were compelled to denounce Israel for its heinous act. A summit in Jordan, which Biden was scheduled to attend with the leaders of Egypt and the Palestinian Authority, was called off. The incident could also broadly damage relations between Israel and the region's Sunni Arab nations, which had been improving in recent years as a result of their
Starting point is 00:16:59 common enmity toward Iran. In particular, it is almost certain to set back the prospects for normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia back the prospects for normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia. Serious talks normalizing Israeli-Saudi relations, along with a growing sense that both Israel and the Arab nations were ignoring the Palestinians' plight, may well have spurred Hamas terrorists to mount their October 7th attack on Israel. In Jacobin, Daniel Finn argued Israel's Western backers are still running interference for Netanyahu's war crimes. Biden claimed that a Palestinian group was responsible for the hospital's strike, but
Starting point is 00:17:32 we shouldn't accept for a moment the idea that the US government is an impartial adjudicator that can be trusted to determine whether or not the Israeli military bombed al-Ahly hospital. It is Israel's strongest ally on the world stage, as Biden's visit is meant to underline, and has every reason to provide Netanyahu's government with political cover after the greatest single loss of life in this war to date. Israel itself has claimed that a misfiring Islamic Jihad rocket was responsible for the carnage at the hospital. Two Israeli government accounts on social media posted a video clip last night that purported to show what had happened.
Starting point is 00:18:05 They later deleted the clip without explanation after journalists pointed out the timestamp, which showed that the recording was made after the explosion took place, Finn said. Quite simply, it is standard for what the right and the left are saying, which brings us to Isaac's take. Just a reminder that this is Isaac's take, and I'm going to be reading it in the first person. Let me get the hard part out of the way first. I think this was probably a misfired rocket from Gaza. A lot of people who were COVID-19 or Ukraine experts yesterday became war experts today, asserting they knew for certain who had done what and why they did it, all in the minutes after this report first broke. Twitter is a cesspool of misinformation right now with fake
Starting point is 00:19:05 accounts, straight-up lies, confident-sounding assertions based on old videos, and people who spent 20 minutes googling about something trying to correct reporters, academics, and researchers who have spent years covering Israel, Palestine, and wars of all kinds. Many of the experts I trust, including those who are quite critical of Israel, seem inclined toward this being a rocket misfire. I'm not a munitions expert or a war correspondent. I'm not on the ground. But I do have some experience reporting on competing claims. I do have experience reporting in the field and I've been trained in how to examine
Starting point is 00:19:38 videos and images for authenticity. I was one of the first reporters to recognize the fake Khan account on X. I have a rolodex of reporters and correspondents and researchers I've been following long before this latest spat of violence and a good sense of who is reliable and who isn't, and I know how misinformation spreads. So I'm analyzing a wide array of views from the people who know how to navigate this stuff, and that's my best assessment. I don't think this was an Israeli strike. I was initially very agnostic on the story. If anything, I was inclined to think it was Israel.
Starting point is 00:20:13 They are, after all, in the middle of a bombardment of Gaza, have damaged other hospitals in Gaza already, have killed scores of civilians, and had even warned this hospital of potential threats after a bomb inadvertently damaged it days prior. Their response, both the video that was removed and the oddly convenient recordings of Hamas militants admitting to the attack, certainly raised my suspicions. But while Israel has lied about events like this in the past, in this case it appears to me that their assessment was accurate. I'm not taking the IDF's word as proof, just as I don't take the U.S. military's word. What we know for sure is not accurate is that the hospital was leveled, or
Starting point is 00:20:50 that the strike definitely came from Israel, as the Palestinian Health Ministry, which is run by Hamas, initially claimed. Reporters should not repeat their claims without skepticism. The death toll of more than 500 civilians also seems highly unlikely, though we probably won't know exactly how devastating the damage was for some time. We are in an information war as much as we are in a shooting war, and everyone should navigate the fog with caution. Now that the assessment is out of the way, let me say this. An explosion at a hospital is not unlike the debate that broke out about precisely how many Israeli children were beheaded or burned alive after Hamas' attack. Journalistically, it is important for us to get this story right. Morally, the finer details are in some ways not the most relevant.
Starting point is 00:21:35 This explosion, whether it was the result of an Israeli rocket or not, has still left rescue crews collecting bodies and remains in a charred parking lot. And while everyone was arguing about who to blame this incident on, Israel did bomb a school run by the United Nations, killing six people. And the situation in Gaza is increasingly desperate. It would be an ethical and strategic blunder to ignore this reality. Take three minutes to watch this video of what it's like for a Palestinian reporter, someone extremely privileged, knowledgeable, and well-informed, trying to evacuate his family. The link for that video is included in today's episode description. Or read the stories of the American
Starting point is 00:22:14 citizens trying to evacuate into Egypt, or the increasingly desperate situation at Gazan hospitals. Consider the fact that some of the people who died in this hospital explosion had heeded warnings that the hospital was at risk, had left to attempt to find alternative shelter, and then returned when they couldn't. Again, Gazans are not responsible for Hamas's crimes, and this strip of land is densely populated with millions of innocent people. Some people are asking the rhetorical question, what should Israel do in response? As a hypothetical, it's a really hard question to answer.
Starting point is 00:22:48 But given the events of the last two weeks, the answer seems obvious to me. Nothing more, because Israel has already responded. They killed 1,500 Hamas fighters in the initial battle. They flattened dozens of buildings in Gaza, including schools, housing, and health centers. At least 19 journalists have been killed, a sign of how wide-reaching the violence has been. Israel has, in all likelihood, killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians, and the number may already be in the thousands. They have displaced one million people.
Starting point is 00:23:20 Senior Hamas leaders are being killed left and right. They're clashing with protesters in the West Bank, where the resulting violence has also killed people. They are rallying support from their allies in Europe and the United States. That is the response. A lot of the commentary assumes Israel should pursue a strategy of uprooting and destroying Hamas, which implies that what we've seen so far is only the beginning. But as the U.S. learned in launching a full-scale attack to destroy Al-Qaeda, what follows could well be worse. As I wrote earlier this week,
Starting point is 00:23:51 Israel should be careful not to repeat the same post-911 mistakes the US has made. Israel's response has already been violent, and it's been forceful, and it's been severe. And it's been devastating. For Palestinians, for Gazans, and for Hamas. But any next steps would make it worse for the innocent. Senator Tom Cotton, the Republican from Arkansas, called for bouncing the rubble in Gaza, a Winston Churchill expression meaning apocalyptic military overkill. Lindsey Graham said we should level the place. Breitbart reporter Joel Pollack, who's Jewish, recently said, if it comes down to ethnic cleansing, you want to cleanse my people, I'll cleanse yours first.
Starting point is 00:24:31 Shortly after President Biden's meeting with Netanyahu, Egypt announced that it would allow humanitarian aid into Gaza. That is a good and sensible step. Frankly, it's jarring that it took so long. But hours later, the hours later the US vetoed a ceasefire the rest of the world voted for, a tacit vote of approval for an Israeli ground offensive. Rather than ramp up to a full-scale invasion, the next move should be to get the nearly 200 hostages Hamas captured back to Israel safely and find a way to get Hamas and Hezbollah to stop launching barrages of rockets into Israel. There appear to be options
Starting point is 00:25:05 on the table. The alternative to that is that Israel goes into Gaza, risks its own soldiers' lives, kills many more on the ground, and potentially drags the region into a prolonged war, and maybe the US into it as well. That kind of response would be predictable, which is a good reason to think it is exactly what Hamas and its allies in Iran want. All of that, on top of the suffering we've already witnessed, should give Israel and the US pause. All right, that is it for Isaac's take. We are skipping today's reader question. Obviously, this was a lot to cover, and we wanted to make sure to give this main story the extra space it needed. If you do have a question that you would like answered in the newsletter or possibly in the podcast, you can write to Isaac directly
Starting point is 00:25:53 at Isaac at ReadTangle.com. That's I-S-A-A-C at ReadTangle.com. Okay, next up is our under-the-radar story. A new global industry is burgeoning, and it offers insight into the future of one of the building blocks of life on Earth. Water. Climate change is spurring both droughts and profusions of water in new areas, forcing governments and businesses to seek it out in unusual places. As a result, the water delivery industry has emerged in recent years with the potential to affect a trillions of dollars in commodities and goods exchanged every year. We're shifting where the water is coming from, says Neil Graham, one of the authors of a recent paper on future global water resources.
Starting point is 00:26:41 Somebody is going to have to use water somewhere to grow these crops. Where it happens is what's up for debate. Bloomberg has this story and there's a link in today's episode description. All right, next up is our numbers section. The number of people who sought refuge in the hospital at the time of the strike, according to Dr. Fadel Naim, head of orthopedic surgery at Al-Ahly Hospital, is 3,000. The number of rockets fired from Gaza the Israeli military said had fallen short of their targets and landed in the Gaza Strip in the past 11 days is 450. The approximate number of people that U.S. officials say were killed in the hospital strike as of Wednesday is 100 to 300. The amount of humanitarian assistance that U.S. officials say were killed in the hospital strike as of Wednesday is 100 to 300.
Starting point is 00:27:26 The amount of humanitarian assistance the U.S. has said it will provide for Palestinians affected by conflict in Gaza and the West Bank is 100 million. The number of trucks carrying aid to Gaza residents that Egypt's President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi agreed to allow into Gaza from the Egyptian border is 20. The percentage of Americans who say that the Israeli government's military response to the Hamas attacks is partially justified is 20%. The percent of Americans who say that the Israeli government's military response to the Hamas attacks is not at all justified is 8%. The approximate number of people arrested at the Israeli-Hamas war rally on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, according to the U.S. Capitol Police, is 300. And last but not least, our Have a Nice Day story. Microplastics are a modern new environmental danger.
Starting point is 00:28:19 Mass quantities of them have been found at the deepest depths of the ocean, swirling around in the jet stream and blowing over remote mountain peaks, and scientists are still trying to study their adverse health effects. But recently, Chinese scientists have figured out a way to potentially rein them in with experimental sponges made out of starch and gelatin that can soak up microplastics before they enter the oceans or broader environment. The key, scientists speaking with Hakai Magazine say, is to cut out the microplastic pollution at its source. Good News Network has this story, and there's a link in today's episode description.
Starting point is 00:29:02 All right, everybody, that is it for today's podcast. As always, if you want to support our work, please go to readtangle.com and sign up for a membership. If you haven't already, please go to our YouTube channel and subscribe there as well. Kind of a shameless plug by me because I edit the YouTube videos and I would love for you to watch them. This week, we released a conversation between Isaac and Christopher Dowling McGill talking about conversion therapy. It was a fascinating and insightful conversation. Really encourage you to go check that out. There's also Isaac's take that has gone viral on Twitter
Starting point is 00:29:39 and other social media regarding Israel. There's really just a lot of content up there and we would love for you to go check that out. On our Instagram page, we've compiled a list of 24 sources that we trust in reporting Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East. It's an ideologically diverse list of reporters who are on the ground. It's analysts, it's experts. And as always, we love to hear from you. So you can leave a comment on this podcast, on a YouTube video, send an email to Isaac, go to the Instagram page, leave some love there. Talk to us, tell us everything you think about everything going on in the world right now. Talk to us about Tangle. Talk to us about good news that's happening in your life. Honestly,
Starting point is 00:30:19 we love to hear it all. Wishing you a happy and safe weekend. And we will talk to you again on Monday. Have a good one. Peace. Our podcast was designed by Magdalena Bukova, who's also our social media manager. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. For more on Tangle, please go to readtangle.com and check out our website. The faster money and data move, the further your business can go to a seamless digital future for Canadians. Let's go faster forward together. In life, interact. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book interior chinatown follows the story of willis woo a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about
Starting point is 00:31:33 a world beyond chinatown when he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime willis begins to unravel a criminal web his family's buried history and what it feels like to be in the spotlight interior chinatown is streaming nove 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages 6 months and older,
Starting point is 00:32:11 and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed.

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