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Ady Barkan, healthcare activist who fought Lou Gehrig’s disease, dies at 39
(JTA) — Ady Barkan, an Israeli-American lawyer and one of the country’s most visible progressive activists for single-payer health care, died Wednesday at a hospital in Santa Barbara, California. He was 39. The cause was ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, which compromised his speech and movement but drove him to fight for patients’ rights.
In 2017, as a new father given just years to live, he literally threw his body into action, protesting Republican initiatives at the U.S. Capitol, crisscrossing the country and raising millions of dollars for political campaigns.
Barkan’s name was invoked in a Democratic presidential debate in 2019, when Sen. Elizabeth Warren, speaking in support of the universal, government-run healthcare proposal known as Medicare for All, cited Barkan’s personal story as an example of the shortfalls of private insurance.
Ahead of the 2020 presidential election, Barkan endorsed Joseph Biden and spoke at the Democratic National Convention that year, though he disagreed with the presidential nominee over health care policy. Biden opposes Medicare for All.
Warren also said she kept a picture of Barkan’s toddler, Carl, in her office.
Barkan was a longtime progressive activist before his diagnosis, inspired as a child by the Harper Lee novel “To Kill a Mockingbird,” according to Politico magazine. He gained attention with efforts to democratize the Federal Reserve. As a senior organizer for the Center for Popular Democracy, he later led its Be A Hero project and affiliated PAC, which worked to defeat Republicans in the 2022 midterms.
He protested President Trump’s 2017 tax cut — even confronting then Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake about it on an airplane flight they shared — because he worried that it would cut funds for social services. He also gained attention for protesting the Supreme Court confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh. After Maine Sen. Susan Collins voted to confirm Kavanaugh, Barkan raised $4 million for her eventual challenger’s unsuccessful campaign.
“We are all profoundly grateful for you, @AdyBarkan,” Rep. Nancy Pelosi tweeted after Democrats won a majority in the House of Representatives in 2018. “Your passion for saving our health care and charting a new path for progressive change were an inspiration throughout the campaign.”
Ohad Barkan, known as Ady, was born in Boston in 1983 to parents who met in Israel: Diana Kormos Buchwald, an immigrant from Romania and a professor of the history of science at the California Institute of Technology, and Elazar Barkan, an Israeli professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University. He grew up Cambridge, Massachusetts and California in what he described as a “secular Jewish household.”
He studied economics at Columbia College, and graduated from Yale Law School in 2010.
In 2019, he pushed Democrats and Republicans to focus more on the individual effects of health care policies. In a video posted to Twitter (now known as X), he invited people to join an initiative that would center people’s health care stories.
“Healthcare is too important to too many people for 30-second sound bites shouted between ten different candidates on a stage, moderated by journalists who are not pissed off enough about the reality that so many Americans are facing in the richest nation in the history of human civilization,” he said. “We need a better health care debate and we need it now. We have to do something about this.”
His story was featured in the 2021 documentary “Not Going Quietly.”
His survivors include his parents, his wife, Rachael King, a professor of English literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, ande their two children, Carl, 7, and Willow, 3.
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The post Ady Barkan, healthcare activist who fought Lou Gehrig’s disease, dies at 39 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Smotrich Says Defense Ministry to Spur Voluntary Emigration from Gaza
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich attends an inauguration event for Israel’s new light rail line for the Tel Aviv metropolitan area, in Petah Tikva, Israel, Aug. 17, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
i24 News – Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said on Sunday that the government would establish an administration to encourage the voluntary migration of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.
“We are establishing a migration administration, we are preparing for this under the leadership of the Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] and Defense Minister [Israel Katz],” he said at a Land of Israel Caucus at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. “The budget will not be an obstacle.”
Referring to the plan championed by US President Donald Trump, Smotrich noted the “profound and deep hatred towards Israel” in Gaza, adding that “sources in the American government” agreed “that it’s impossible for two million people with hatred towards Israel to remain at a stone’s throw from the border.”
The administration would be under the Defense Ministry, with the goal of facilitating Trump’s plan to build a “Riviera of the Middle East” and the relocation of hundreds of thousands of Gazans for rebuilding efforts.
“If we remove 5,000 a day, it will take a year,” Smotrich said. “The logistics are complex because you need to know who is going to which country. It’s a potential for historical change.”
The post Smotrich Says Defense Ministry to Spur Voluntary Emigration from Gaza first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Defense Ministry: 16,000 Wounded in War, About Half Under 30
A general view shows the plenum at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in Jerusalem. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
i24 News – The Knesset’s (Israeli parliament’s) Special Committee for Foreign Workers held a discussion on Sunday to examine the needs of wounded and disabled IDF soldiers and the response foreign caregivers could provide.
During the discussion, data from the Defense Minister revealed that the number of registered IDF wounded and disabled veterans rose from 62,000 to 78,000 since the war began on October 7, 2023. “Most of them are reservists and 51 percent of the wounded are up to 30 years old,” the ministry’s report said. The number will increase, the ministry assesses, as post-trauma cases emerge.
The committee chairwoman, Knesset member Etty Atiya (Likud), emphasized the need to reduce unnecessary bureaucracy for the wounded and to remove obstacles. “There is no dispute that the IDF disabled have sacrificed their bodies and souls for the people of Israel, for the state of Israel,” she said. Addressing the veterans, she continued: “And we, as public representatives and public servants alike, must do everything, but everything, to improve your lives in any way possible, to alleviate your pain and the distress of your family members who are no less affected than you.”
Currently, extensions are being given to the IDF veterans on a three-month basis, which Atiya said creates uncertainty and fear among the patients.
“The committee calls on the Interior Minister [Moshe Arbel] to approve as soon as possible the temporary order on our table, so that it will reach the approval of the Knesset,” she said, adding that she “intends to personally approach the Director General of the Population Authority [Shlomo Mor-Yosef] on the matter in order to promote a quick and stable solution.”
The post Defense Ministry: 16,000 Wounded in War, About Half Under 30 first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Over 1,300 Killed in Syria as New Regime Accused of Massacring Civilians
Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad speaks during an interview with Sky News Arabia in Damascus, Syria in this handout picture released by the Syrian Presidency on August 8, 2023. Syrian Presidency/Handout via REUTERS
i24 News – Over 1,300 people were killed in two days of fighting in Syria between security forces under the new Syrian Islamist leaders and fighters from ousted president Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite sect on the other hand, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights on Sunday.
Since Thursday, 1,311 people had been killed, according to the Observatory, including 830 civilians, mainly Alawites, 231 Syrian government security personnel, and 250 Assad loyalists.
The intense fighting broke out late last week as the Alawite militias launched an offensive against the new government’s fighters in the coastal region of the country, prompting a massive deployment ordered by new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa.
“We must preserve national unity and civil peace as much as possible and… we will be able to live together in this country,” al-Sharaa said, as quoted in the BBC.
The death toll represents the most severe escalations since Assad was ousted late last year, and is one of the most costly in terms of human lives since the civil war began in 2011.
The counter-offensive launched by al-Sharaa’s forces was marked by reported revenge killings and atrocities in the Latakia region, a stronghold of the Alawite minority in the country.
The post Over 1,300 Killed in Syria as New Regime Accused of Massacring Civilians first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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