Hospitals are just the latest vital public services to be hit in Cuba, more than a month since Washington took measures to block oil supplies from entering the Caribbean nation.
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Ukraine: danger is only increasing, warns UN human rights office
More than four years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the “danger is only increasing”, particularly from attack drones, a top UN human rights official warned on Thursday. -
Record GP access figures
Dr Amanda Doyle, National Director for Primary Care and Community Services at NHS England, said: “GP teams are working harder than ever, delivering more than 1.5 million appointments for patients every working day over the last year – the highest number on record. “In part, this is due to practices now offering patients the choice […] -
Geopolitics and Drug Shortages
The war in Iran is challenging pharmaceutical supply chains and revealing strains in the system.
The post Geopolitics and Drug Shortages first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.
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May 20th: ‘Beginning To Live’ A celebration with its author – Emmy van Deurzen
Part of the Challenging the culture of diagnosis & disorder! collectionWednesday, May 20, 2026 from 6 pm to 7:30 pm GMT+1Emmy will talk about the inspiration behind her new book and what it offers readers.
On 14th May 2026 “Beginning To Live; The Art of Existential Freedom” will be published by Allen Lane.
Emmy will introduce us to her new book and share her reasons for writing it. You can expect as always an inspiring, warm and deeply human talk from Emmy and there will be an opportunity to ask questions too.About Beginning To Live
A user’s guide to the everyday challenges of living, which looks to philosophy to reframe the way we understand ourselves and our relationships
How can we find our own direction and purpose? When life feels too much, is it possible to free ourselves from the concerns that weigh us down? Whether you’re in therapy or prefer to find your own way through life’s struggles, pioneering therapist Emmy van Deurzen offers a lifeline for rebuilding trust in the world.
Beginning to Live is a practical invitation to step back and discover what really matters by considering each of the four key aspects of our experience in turn: physical, social, personal and spiritual.
Harnessing over fifty years’ experience, this book is filled with wisdom and moving stories that show how to deal with dilemmas and difficulties of every kind, so that even when survival takes all you have, you can rekindle confidence in your own abilities and revitalize your capacity to relate to others. It is not about a quality of personality or character, which you either have or don’t have, van Deurzen shows. It is about a way of being, which is available to each of us – enabling us all to find a more engaged way of living that is purposeful, deliberate and buoyant.
Your future is a work of art in progress. And it starts here.
Emmy van Deurzen is an existential therapist, counselling psychologist, and philosopher, who lives in the UK and who has written numerous books on life issues. Her work has been translated into over 30 languages. She founded the Society for Existential Analysis and its journal in 1988, the Regent’s School of Psychotherapy in 1990, and the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling in 1996. She continues to be a director of the latter and of the Existential Academy and Dilemma Consultancy, both of which she co-founded with Digby Tantam. She is a visiting professor with Middlesex University and President of the worldwide Existential Movement. Emmy is an international speaker who has given presentations and workshops on five continents.
Emmy’s other books include the bestseller Existential Psychotherapy and Counselling in Practice (Sage, 3d edition 2012), Psychotherapy and the Quest for Happiness (Sage, 2009), Everyday Mysteries (Routledge, 2nd ed, 2010), Paradox and Passion (Wiley, 2nd ed 2015) and Rising from Existential Crisis (PCCS books, 2021). Her book The Art of Freedom: Guide to a Wiser Life will be published by Penguin. She is also co-authoring a book for Routledge on Structural Existential Analysis, with Dr. Claire Arnold-Baker.
This is a donation only event to maximise accessibility.
Your donation will support the work of AD4E and help us to offer more free and cheap tickets at upcoming workshops.
Suggested donations
On benefits -£3
low waged -£5
Medium waged – £15
High waged – £30
Organisation funded – £40
This talk will be recorded and sent out to those signed up.
The post May 20th: ‘Beginning To Live’ A celebration with its author – Emmy van Deurzen appeared first on Mad in the UK.
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May 7th: Narrative Therapy Techniques for Identifying Meaning with Ben Yalom
Part of the Challenging the culture of diagnosis & disorder! collectionThursday, May 7, 2026 from 6 pm to 7:30 pm GMT+1A beautiful and rare opportunity for therapists to see Ben work with powerful narrative therapy techniques in a live demonstration.
In this AD4E workshop, Ben Yalom will explore how we can work with people to distil meaning, challenge and mission in their live. Drawing on a Narrative Therapy based “mission interview” approach developed by Tom Stone Carlson and adapted by Ben in his own practice, the workshop will include a live demonstration with a participant, followed by a discussion of the underlying ideas and a chance to as Ben your questions.
Bio
Benjamin Yalom is a psychotherapist, creative coach, theater-maker, and writer. His therapy and coaching focus on understanding and aligning one’s values with one’s living, and unlocking creative approaches to work and life. He is a longtime writing collaborator with his father, Irvin D. Yalom. Prior to his current doctoral studies in Marriage and Family Therapy, Ben was the visionary force behind foolsFURY theater, which helped transform San Francisco’s performing arts scene in the early 2000s. He is also an award-winning fiction writer, and holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives with his wife, Dr. Anisa Yalom, and their three children in San Diego.For more on Ben’s therapeutic work click hereHour of the Heart; Connecting in the Here and Now
By Irving Yalom and Benjamin Yalom
Facing memory loss as he approached 90, iconic psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom was forced to vastly reconsider his sessions with patients. Rather than throw in the towel, he revolutionized his practice, focusing on what might be achieved in a one-hour, one-time-only meeting between patient and practitioner.
In Hour of the Heart, Yalom recounts some of these intense, life-changing consultations, as well as changes to his memory and sense of self. These stories show how a therapist’s willingness to be open helps patients let down their own guards, leading to deeper and more immediate connection.
Life is precious and our time together short. Written in collaboration with his son, Hour of the Heart shows us how to relate better in the moment, with more honesty and vulnerabilityA CPD certificate for 1.5 hours will be available after the workshop.
The post May 7th: Narrative Therapy Techniques for Identifying Meaning with Ben Yalom appeared first on Mad in the UK.
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How to Slander a Humanitarian Mission
The two of us just returned this week to New Orleans from Havana, Cuba. We had traveled there alongside hundreds of volunteers from around the world on the Nuestra América aid mission, delivering tons of desperately-needed supplies to a country suffering under a U.S. blockade of fuel (in addition to the preexisting U.S. trade embargo). Current Affairs went along to report on the convoy and to document firsthand the effects of the blockade on ordinary Cubans. A longer report will be appearing in the next print edition of our magazine, but what we saw was harrowing. The whole country plunged into a blackout while we were there, because the fuel shortage brought down the national electrical grid. The entire city of Havana was in almost total darkness, with only a handful of solar or generator lamps shining out.
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EFF Sues for Answers About Medicare’s AI Experiment
Little Is Known About AI That Could Affect Millions of Seniors’ CareSAN FRANCISCO – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) seeking records about a multi-state program that is using AI to evaluate requests for medical care.
“Tasking an algorithm with making determinations about treatment can create unwarranted—and even discriminatory—delays or denials of necessary medical care,” said Kit Walsh, EFF’s Director of AI and Access-to-Knowledge Legal Projects. “Given these serious risks, the public requires transparency that it hasn’t gotten. We’re suing to get badly needed answers about how Medicare’s AI experiment works.”
Announced by CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz last year, the pilot program known as WISeR (Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction) uses AI to assess prior authorization requests from Medicare beneficiaries. Previously rare in original Medicare, prior authorization requires medical providers to obtain advance approval from a patient’s health insurer before delivering certain treatments or services as a condition of coverage.
Unfortunately, there is little information about how the AI algorithms used in WISeR work, including what training data they rely on. It remains unclear whether WISeR has any safeguards against systemic flaws such as algorithmic bias, privacy violations, and wrongful denials of care.
Healthcare experts, care providers, and lawmakers have all raised alarms that WISeR may cause serious harm to patients by relying on AI unless it has the necessary safeguards. Despite this widespread criticism, WISeR was rolled out in six states in January, potentially affecting as many as 6.4 million Medicare beneficiaries, according to one estimate.
By design, WISeR incentivizes contracted companies to deny prior approval against the best interests of patients. Vendors are compensated, in part, on the volume of healthcare services they deny and are entitled to as much as 20 percent of the associated savings. Just weeks after WISeR’s launch, hospitals and other health care providers started reporting delays in care approval, communication gaps, and administrative strain.
Earlier this year, EFF submitted a FOIA request to CMS asking for records related to WISeR. Among other records, the request sought agreements with software vendors participating in WISeR; records related to any tests for accuracy, bias, or hallucinations in vendors’ technology; and records related to any audits, monitoring, or evaluation of WISeR and participating vendors. To date, CMS has not provided any of these records to EFF. EFF’s FOIA lawsuit asks for their immediate processing and release.
“The public has a right to know more about the algorithms driving decisions around their healthcare,” said Tori Noble, Staff Attorney at EFF. “Without greater transparency, patients, providers, and policymakers will continue to be left in the dark.”
EFF thanks Stanford Law School’s Juelsgaard Intellectual Property & Innovation Clinic for their help in preparing this lawsuit.
For the complaint: https://www.eff.org/document/complaint-eff-v-cms-medicare-wiser-foia
Contact: -
Doctors announce six-day strike in England as talks break down
The walkout over jobs and pay is one of the longest yet in the dispute, and will begin on 7 April in England. -
Supreme Court Wipes Out Record Labels’ $1 Billion Piracy Judgment Against Cox
When a Virginia jury ordered internet provider Cox to pay $1 billion in damages for failing to take appropriate actions against pirating subscribers, shockwaves rippled through the ISP industry.
The verdict, in favor of major record labels including Sony and Universal, was a catalyst for many other ‘repeat infringer’ lawsuits. This resulted in yet more multi-million dollar claims and awards, with many still in the pipeline today.
Meanwhile, Cox did everything it could to fight the verdict, all the way up to the Supreme Court, which formally heard the case last December. The panel had to decide whether an ISP can be held liable for not taking any action in response to piracy notices, which the Court answered today with a clear no.
Supreme Court Reverses: Knowledge is Not Intent
In a 7-2 decision handed down this morning, the Court reversed the Fourth Circuit decision, ruling that Cox is not contributorily liable for the infringing actions of its pirating subscribers. The opinion was written by Justice Thomas and is joined by six other justices. Justices Sotomayor and Jackson concurred, but disagreed sharply with the majority’s reasoning.
The opinion states that contributory liability requires proof that the provider intended its service to be used for infringement. That intent can only be shown in one of two ways. Either the provider actively induced infringement, or the service is one that has no substantial non-infringing uses.
In the present case, Cox met neither test. It never encouraged its subscribers to pirate anything. And internet access, as the Court noted, is used for countless lawful purposes.
“Under our precedents, a company is not liable as a copyright infringer for merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights. Accordingly, we reverse,” Justice Thomas writes.
The Court also directly countered the Fourth Circuit’s reasoning, which held that supplying a product with “knowledge” of future infringement was enough to establish liability. The Supreme Court called this an improper expansion of copyright law that conflicted with decades of precedent.
This means that Cox may have known about the infringing activity of its subscribers, but that they are not liable for not taking action in response.
The “IP Address” Problem
In a concurring opinion, Justice Sotomayor agreed that Cox shouldn’t be held liable, but for a more practical reason. Under the common-law aiding-and-abetting doctrine, which she argued the majority should have applied, liability requires proof that a defendant intended to help a specific wrongful act succeed.
Sotomayor noted that when the anti-piracy tracking company MarkMonitor flagged an infringing IP address, it only identified a connection, not an individual. Whether the infringer was a specific account holder, a roommate, or a neighbor stealing Wi-Fi remained a mystery.
Without knowing who was actually infringing, Sotomayor argued, it is impossible to prove Cox intended to help that specific person succeed in their “wrongful act”.
Is the DMCA Safe Harbor Now “Obsolete”?
The ruling leaves a massive question mark over the future of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Sony argued that the DMCA’s “safe harbor” provisions, which require ISPs to terminate “repeat infringers”, would be meaningless if ISPs weren’t already liable for serving those infringers in the first place.
Justice Sotomayor went even further, warning that the majority’s new rule “consigns the safe harbor provision to obsolescence”, adding that ISPs now have little incentive to take any action against online pirates.
“The majority’s decision thus permits ISPs to sell an internet connection to every single infringer who wants one without fear of liability and without lifting a finger to prevent infringement,” she notes.
What Happens Next
With today’s opinion, the verdict is reversed and remanded to the Fourth Circuit for further proceedings. Whether the music labels will pursue further litigation on remand, and what that would look like, remains to be seen.
For rightsholders, the ruling removes the primary legal tool they have used to pressure ISPs to terminate infringers more aggressively. For ISPs, however, it resolves years of uncertainty about how far they have to go in response to copyright infringement notices. Whether that means that they will indeed take less action has yet to be seen.
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A copy of the Supreme Court’s opinion is available here (pdf). This is a developing story; more quotes, comments, and notes may be added later.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.