U.S. Pauses Arms Shipment to Israel As Rafah Invasion Looms [Full News Memo]

The Chicken With No Head, New Weight-Loss Drugs Becoming Increasingly Popular, Student Protests At Columbia University Were Planned Months In Advance

• U.S. Pauses Arms Shipment to Israel As Rafah Invasion Looms

• Trends: New Weight-Loss Drugs Becoming Increasingly Popular

• 🐔‘Mike’ The Chicken Who Lived 18 Months With No Head

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Newsbites

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Columbia University canceled their main 2024 commencement ceremony due to the protests in recent weeks. Instead, they will hold small gatherings with individual students. Amid the cancellation, 500 Jewish students at Columbia wrote a letter on Google Docs titled: In Our Name: A Message from Jewish Students at Columbia University. The document reads, “We are average students, just trying to make it through finals much like the rest of you. Those who demonize us under the cloak of anti-Zionism forced us into our activism and forced us to publicly defend our Jewish identities.” It continues, “contrary to what many have tried to sell you – no, Judaism cannot be separated from Israel. Zionism is, simply put, the manifestation of that belief.”

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The port of Baltimore is set to reopen at the end of May, per Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. The channel has largely been closed since March 26 when a shipping vessel crashed into a pillar of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, triggering its collapse.

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Student protests at Columbia University were planned months in advance with left-wing activist groups, according to a recent report from The Wall Street Journal. Students had actively researched the best ways to form a protest and worked closely with National Students for Justice in Palestine, as well as former members of the Black Panther movement. “We took notes from our elders, engaged in dialogue with them and analyzed how the university responded to previous protests,” said Sueda Polat, a student and protest organizer at Columbia. In March, a group of Columbia students held a video call titled “Resistance 101” that featured a group called Samidoun, an activist group that celebrated the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. 

More: Here is the video call for the Resistance 101 meeting that has since been posted on YouTube (p.s. We did some digging to find this link)

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OpenAI plans to release a new search engine, powered by ChatGPT, to compete with Google this coming Monday.

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Israeli singer Eden Golan was met with massive protests during her performance at Eurovision Song Contest in Malmö, Sweden, this week. Golan, who is 20-years-old, performed a song about mourning the October 7 attacks in Israel. Tens of thousands of protestors gathered outside of her hotel room in disapproval of her presence at the contest. She was escorted from her hotel to the show by 100 Swedish police officers.(official live performance)

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Main Stories

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U.S. Pauses Arms Shipment to Israel As Rafah Invasion Looms

"If we need to ... we will stand alone. I have said that if necessary we will fight with our fingernails." - President Benjamin Netenyahu

What’s going on?
More than 80,000 civilians have fled the city of Rafah in recent days as targeted attacks from Israel’s military have been launched in eastern Rafah. A larger scale entry looms as tanks rolled into the periphery of Rafah on Tuesday. 

• About 1.3M Palestinians (including 600,000 children) live in the city of Rafah, more than half of the population of Gaza at large. Hamas military is operating among the civilian population in underground tunnels and hidden areas.

Israel says it is necessary to take control of Rafah and eliminate the remaining Hamas military in order to win the war. But further attacks on the most populous area of Gaza risk immense civilian casualties. In addition, the infrastructure of aid relief for Palestinians continues to be fractured and limited food and hospital supplies are available.

U.S. Says It Will Cut Some Weaponry if Israel Invades
Last week, the U.S. paused an arms shipment to Israel that included 2,000 pound bombs, the weaponry that could potentially do the most damage in Rafah. President Biden also warned this week that if Israel (a strong U.S. ally in the region) launches a large-scale attack on Rafah, the U.S. would stop supplying other specific weaponry that Israel has relied on. In an interview with CNN, Biden said, 

"If they go into Rafah, I'm not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah."

Israeli President Benjamin Netenyahu responded dismissing the need for U.S. support.

"If we need to ... we will stand alone. I have said that if necessary we will fight with our fingernails.”

"In the War of Independence 76 years ago, we were the few against the many," Netenyahu said "We did not have weapons. There was an arms embargo on Israel, but with great strength of spirit, heroism and unity among us - we were victorious."

Israel’s Minister of National Security also responded to the news tweeting the following:

Reminder: Who is Hamas?
Formed in the late 1980s, Hamas is an Islamic militant group that has controlled Gaza since 2007, a 25-mile strip of land along the Mediterranean Sea. Hamas is classified as a terrorist group by the U.S., Canada, and the EU.

Hamas has never recognized Israel as a legitimate country. In its 1988 founding covenant, Hamas wrote: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” 

Read Hamas’ founding covenant.

More

• President Biden is facing pushback on all levels. On the one hand, his decision to pull back some support to Israel is more appealing to his more left-leaning base, including those who have been protesting Israel’s “genocide” across the U.S. in recent weeks. 

• On the other hand, he is losing support from moderate Democrats, including one of his largest donors, Haim Saban, who strongly disapproved of the decision to pause the arms shipment to Israel. The following message from Saban to one of Biden’s aids was shared by an Axios reporter:

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The purpose of Trends is to cover shifts happening in the culture or patterns in data that seem interesting/important, and therefore, worth discussing.

Trends: New Weight-Loss Drugs Becoming Increasingly Popular

Americans’ next addiction may be weight-loss drugs. Thanks to FDA approval and entrance into mainstream culture, weight-loss prescriptions such as Ozempic and Wegovy are exploding in popularity.

Novo Nordisk, the maker of both Ozempic and Wegovy, said in the first quarter of 2024 that 25,000 new users were signing up for Wegovy every week, more than five times the rate a year ago. JP Morgan estimates that by 2030 some 30 million Americans could be on weight-loss drugs, or about 10% of the population.

The U.S. is a huge market for weight-loss drugs, as more than 70% of the population is considered overweight or obese based on Body Mass Index (BMI Calculator), and over 10% are estimated to have diabetes. 

What led to the rise in popularity? 
The short answer is because the new weight-loss drugs are effective. On average, trial participants report losing about 15% of their body weight after taking the medication for 12-months. The full story, however, is a little more nuanced. Originally, the new class of weight-loss drugs were designed for those with Type 2 diabetes.