Category World News

It has been more than a month since a “ceasefire” took hold in Gaza. That, of course, does not mean that the killing of Palestinians has stopped. It simply means that it has been reduced to a rate that allows international media to ignore it.

And so, the world has largely moved on from the story. But I haven’t.

In July 2024, I joined a medical mission to Gaza and spent 22 days there, volunteering at hospitals. What I came back with is something I cannot easily explain.

The man my family knew, the son, brother, and husband they laughed with, the father who played with his children, feels lost to them now.

I call him the “previous Talal”.

My children, wife, siblings, parents, friends and colleagues, they all see the change. They tell me I have become distant, quiet, detached, and sometimes hard to reach. My emotions are messy and raw in ways words often fail to capture. It is not a single feeling, but a swarm of emotions that is not going away despite the news of a “ceasefire” and reassurances of “reconstruction”.

After witnessing human tragedy of indescribable proportions, I still feel anger bubbling at the injustice of it all, guilt for leaving behind the vulnerable, and a constant, aching helplessness at not being able to do something to stop this continuing annihilation.

I still feel uneasy when I see a lavish buffet meal on a table in front of me, knowing people continue to starve in Gaza.

The faces and scenes I have witnessed continue playing like a never-ending movie in my head: Starving children reduced to skeletons, parents who held onto body parts of their beloved children, completely charred humans, cozy blankets used as shrouds for human body parts, a bombed hospital, levelled buildings emitting the odour of decomposing bodies buried in their rubble.

I am still haunted by the choices I had to make: which patient to treat because there were not enough dialysis machines, or what words to use to explain to a child why their parent will not wake up.

Gaza has transformed me from a nephrologist to a journalist, storyteller, and humanitarian. Since I came back, I have written articles, spoken at mosques and universities, led talks at fundraisers, stood at marches, and met lawmakers, advocating for the oppressed people of Gaza in every way I can. Just like other colleagues who have been on medical missions to the Gaza Strip, I have tried to turn bearing witness into action so that Gaza is not forgotten.

I have tried to go back several times. Each time, Israel has denied me entry. Each denial has made my heart ache worse.

The distance between what I can do here and what is needed there feels unbearable. I constantly ask myself, “Am I doing enough? Have I failed?”

Is this sadness? Trauma? A conscience that refuses to be at peace? I do not know the proper label, and labels do not lessen the load.

What I do know is this: Gaza changed me in a way that cannot be undone, and to pretend otherwise would be a betrayal of what I saw and of the people I met.

The previous Talal is lost, but this new Talal is more humane, kind, compassionate, more realistic, more courageous and vocal, driven by the resilience and faith of the people of Gaza.

No medical training could prepare me to maintain a “life-genocide balance”.

Still, the despair and pain I carry now are only a pinch of what the Palestinians have endured day after day, for more than two years now. They have experienced unimaginable horrors, torture, starvation, injury and death.

If you read my story, please read not to offer sympathy but to remember: The genocide in Gaza is not over, and the besieged people of Gaza are still suffering. Behind every statistic in Gaza, there are human souls, ambitions, hopes and dignity.

The ceasefire is a temporary relief from the mass bombardment; true peace will come only when the occupation ends and justice is served.

As I share my emotions and experiences in Gaza, I am also heartbroken about what is happening in Sudan. It feels like watching a tragic replay of suffering and loss, human devastation livestreamed every day.

What troubles me even more is how easily the world seems to be getting used to it. This realisation is harrowing. Human civilisation has achieved so much in terms of progress and development, yet we seem to be regressing when it comes to compassion and humanity.

I write these words to call on people to take action.

To my fellow healthcare workers and humanitarians who have volunteered in Gaza, I say: we cannot let the world turn its back. We must not stop speaking about what we witnessed and what continues to happen in Gaza. We must continue to inform, rally and insist that full humanitarian and medical access to Gaza is granted.

To my fellow Americans, I say, we bear responsibility for what is happening in Gaza. Our country is directly involved in it, our taxpayers’ money is funding it. Do not stay silent because of intimidation. Speak, write, post and talk about it in your communities. Call your lawmakers. Do not allow the mass bombardment, torture and starvation of another people to be normalised.

And to all people of the world who still believe in the possibility of a free and just world, I say: the responsibility is ours to make sure it is. We have witnessed a livestreamed genocide, one of the greatest moral tests of our time. So do not fall into silence. Rise. Refuse to let a temporary ceasefire in Gaza or a protracted war in Sudan become a curtain that hides the genocidal reality. Keep insisting on an end to the violence, for the dignity of every human life.

Let us be the force that helps Gaza and Sudan heal, rebuild and remember, so that “never again” becomes “never again for all”!

Last month, tech billionaire Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, an AI-powered platform, to rival online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

“Grokipedia will exceed Wikipedia by several orders of magnitude in breadth, depth and accuracy,” Musk posted on X the day after his site went live on October 27.

In the age of generative artificial intelligence and AI-assisted search engines, Wikipedia remains an information repository authored by humans.

Grokipedia will exceed Wikipedia by several orders of magnitude in breadth, depth and accuracy https://t.co/Nt4M6vqEZu

Yet PolitiFact found Grokipedia’s articles are often almost entirely lifted from Wikipedia. And when the entries differ, Grokipedia’s information quality and sourcing are problematic and error-prone, making it a less reliable research tool.

Musk said on an October 31 episode of the “All-In” tech and business podcast that his team instructed his company’s chatbot, Grok, to go through the top 1 million Wikipedia articles and then “add, modify and delete”.

“So that means research the rest of the internet, whatever is publicly available, and correct the Wikipedia articles, fix mistakes, but also add a lot more context,” he said on the podcast.

Grokipedia articles often contain the text “Fact-checked by Grok“.

PolitiFact reviewed Grokipedia articles and found that when they include language that’s different from what appeared on Wikipedia, the new content:

• Is not supported by citations;
• Does not provide references; or
• Introduces misleading or opinionated claims.

Grokipedia often also removes context from its articles.

A sample of Grokipedia’s 885,279 articles reveals they are subject to a similar AI-related phenomenon we first saw in May, prior to the tool’s unveiling. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr then released a Make America Healthy Again report that contained several erroneous citations, including crediting sources that did not exist.

Joseph Reagle, Northeastern University associate professor of communication studies, said Grokipedia misunderstands Wikipedia’s and AI’s strengths.

“Wikipedia’s merits are that it is the result of a community of thousands of people diligently working to create high-quality content,” Reagle said, while AI is useful when it’s interactive and accepts pushback.

Hundreds of thousands of volunteers worldwide contribute content to Wikipedia, guided by the platform’s editorial policies and guidelines.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, is aware of Grokipedia’s copying problem.

“Even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist,” said Selena Decklemann, chief product and technology officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, in a statement to PolitiFact. “Wikipedia’s content is open source by design; we expect it will be used in good faith to educate. This issue is especially urgent as platforms like Grokipedia increasingly draw on our articles, selectively extracting content – written by thousands of volunteers – and filtering it through opaque and unaccountable algorithms.”

Entries are nearly identical, except for wrong or missing references

We looked at Grokipedia articles covering various topics including science, music and economics. In many articles we reviewed, Grokipedia links to Wikipedia articles with this statement: “The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.”

That means Wikipedia’s licensing allows Grokipedia to copy, redistribute and adapt the content with an attribution. It also requires Grokipedia to give the same permissions for its adapted content. (There are some articles that don’t copy from Wikipedia and don’t feature this statement, such as the article for Joseph Stalin.)

Grokipedia’s article structure is similar to Wikipedia’s, which features reference lists at the bottom. But in some instances, Grokipedia copies Wikipedia articles while omitting their citations and reference lists.

Grokipedia’s article for “Monday,” for example, includes information about the day of the week’s etymology, related religious observances and cultural references. But it contains no citations other than to say it was adapted from Wikipedia.

The Grokipedia article was a 96 percent match of Wikipedia’s “Monday” article, according to Copyscape, a plagiarism checker. The Wikipedia article, however, listed 22 references.

Sometimes Grokipedia botches citations. In the entry for “culminating point,” Grokipedia cited the wrong book chapter in which military theorist Carl von Clausewitz introduced the concept. The rest of the article text is copied from Wikipedia.

One article that differs significantly from its Wikipedia counterpart is the entry for “Hello”, a song by British singer Adele. Multiple items in the Grokipedia reference list are Instagram reels that provide secondhand, unattributed information and commentary. Wikipedia’s standards say such user-generated content is “generally unacceptable as sources”.

In the entry for the Canadian singer Feist, Grokipedia copied from Wikipedia but added a line saying her father died in May 2021. The citation led to Vice’s 2017 ranking of the 60 best Canadian indie rock songs, an article that doesn’t mention the death of Feist’s father, who was still alive that year.

Grokipedia lacks transparency on correcting errors

PolitiFact found at least one instance when Grokipedia introduced misleading information.

The Grokipedia and Wikipedia articles for “Nobel Prize in Physics” are largely the same, but one sentence Grokipedia added said, “Physics is traditionally the first award presented in the Nobel Prize ceremony.” It did not provide a citation, and it appears to be wrong: In at least the past few years, the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded first.

“Unlike Grokipedia, which relies on rapid AI-generated content with limited transparency and oversight, Wikipedia’s processes are open to public review and rigorously document the sources behind every article,” Decklemann said.

Wikipedia allows anyone to contribute and edit articles, and ensures transparency by making the history of an article viewable. Some volunteers have advanced permissions and are equipped to address negative behaviour on the platform.

However, Wikipedia has come under scrutiny after an editor blocked changes to an article on the Gaza genocide page.

On Grokipedia, registered users can suggest edits to published articles. But Grokipedia has no feature allowing readers to view what edits have been made. It is unclear what happens when there are errors – whether a human or Grok corrects them, how those changes are deliberated, and how long it takes to update pages.

Gen Z protesters in Mexico are demanding an end to impunity for gang violence and calling for justice for the mayor of Uruapan, Carlos Manzo, who was assassinated at a Day of the Dead event on November 1.