“There were 15 of my family in our house, and now many of them are dead.”

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Dahr Jamail has filed a new dispatch from Lebanon. Over the weekend he visited a number of hospitals in the south and interviewed civilian victims of the fighting. He writes:

Returning from traveling to Sidon on Saturday, I was emotionally exhausted, physically sick from what I saw.

The first hospital I visited with two photographer friends was the largest in the south, Hamoudi Hospital. After asking permission, we were taken to several rooms of patients there.

In the first room, I met 77 year-old Mousa Sif, an old man who sat on the end of his bed, his eyes expressing a mixture of shock, fatigue, grief and sadness. “The second day of the war the Israelis bombed my home,” he told me.

He, his family and several neighbors had gone to the UN building nearby their home, seeking shelter, but the UN people sent them back to their home.

“We were bombed by the Israelis during our trip to the UN, then on our way back home, several of the vehicles were hit,” he told me wearily, “Then they bombed our home. There were 15 of my family in our house, and now many of them are dead.”

Read the rest here.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

payment methods

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