Dr Ruth Mitchell (she/her/ella)

I’d love to tell you all my stories of taking bullets out of people’s brains and spines but I live in #Australia so there have only been 2, despite working in the biggest and busiest #trauma centres for over a decade #ThisISMyLane #Thisisourlane Prevention is better than cure.

If 9 Jewish paramedics were killed ANYWHERE in the world it would be called terrorism. And we’d never hear the end of it. Israel slaughtered 9 paramedics in 72 hours, most of which we’ve seen on film, and we only hear their names on Twitter.

The day before he was due to appear at Senate Estimates for the first time ever following a successful Greens motion in the Senate. TIMING.

Silence in the mainstream media despite a raft of sexual assaults against #gbsumudflotilla activists abducted by IDF in international waters @ABCmediawatch x.com/gbsumudflotill…

One of the saddest scenes in the modern world is an immigrant apologizing for their accent to someone who speaks only one language.

A group of Australian citizens were kidnapped on international waters and beaten senseless on camera by their captors - Israel The most prominent Israel advocate in Australia - Jillian Segal - has so far said nothing about the welfare of her fellow Australian citizens nor condemned this atrocious abuse of human rights and brutality by her home state of Israel Jillian Segal is an employee of the Australian people charged with promoting "social cohesion" and her silence on this blatant Israeli abuse of her fellow Australians is a disgrace to these abused citizens and to the Australian taxpayers who fund her

A 22-year-old graduate student in Kazakhstan got so angry at journal paywalls in 2011 that she built a pirate website holding 88 million scientific papers, and last month she turned the whole thing into an AI that lets you ask one question and get the actual research as the answer. Her name is Alexandra Elbakyan, and the website is called Sci-Hub. The AI she just launched is called Sci-Bot. It lives at sci-bot.ru and almost nobody outside academia knows it exists yet. Here is the story, because it is one of the strangest things to happen in science publishing in the last 50 years. Elbakyan was born in Almaty in 1988, the year the Soviet Union started to collapse. She taught herself programming at 12. She read Soviet science books that explained things her family used to call miracles. She got into computer security at university and graduated in 2009 with a degree she barely needed because by then she was already a serious hacker. Alexandra moved to Moscow that fall. Then Germany. Then a research internship in the United States. She was working on brain-computer interfaces, the kind of research that requires you to read hundreds of papers a year just to keep up with the field. And every single one of those papers was locked behind a journal paywall that cost between 30 and 50 dollars to read once. She did the math. A graduate student in Kazakhstan could not afford to read science. The first thing she did was learn how to get around the paywalls one paper at a time. She passed the trick around to other students. They asked her for papers constantly. She got tired of doing it manually. So in September 2011, in three days, she wrote a script that automated the whole thing. A user pastes a DOI. The script logs in through a donated institutional credential. The paper comes back free. The website caches it. The next person who asks for that paper gets it instantly because the previous request already saved a copy. That was Sci-Hub. Three days of code. One graduate student. Done. 15 years later, the cache holds 88 million scientific papers. Almost every piece of scholarly literature published before 2020 is sitting on her servers. Researchers in 190 countries use it. Studies in Nature have shown that roughly half of all academic paper downloads worldwide now go through Sci-Hub, not the publishers who actually own the copyrights. Elsevier sued her in 2015 and won a 15 million dollar judgment. She did not pay. The American Chemical Society sued her and won an injunction. She did not comply. Courts in India, France, Russia, and the UK have tried to block the domain. She just moves it. Sci-hub.se. Sci-hub.ru. Sci-hub.ee. The site has had over 20 domains and is still up. Nature put her on its list of the 10 people who mattered most to science in 2016. The New York Times compared her to Edward Snowden. The Verge called her the pirate queen of science. She has not been to the United States in over a decade because she would be arrested at the airport. The Sci-Bot launch in April 2026 is the part that nobody is talking about. She took the 88 million paper database and put a small language model on top of it. You ask a question in plain English. The model searches the entire shadow library, pulls the relevant papers, synthesizes an answer grounded in real citations, and links you to the full text of every source. Free. No login. No institutional credential. No paywall. Three real scientists tested it for a Chemical and Engineering News article last month. They asked it medical and chemistry questions. The radiologist said the answer he got was usable. The chemist said the gaps in recent literature were obvious but the older science was solid. The publisher community is furious. What she built is what the paid academic AI tools are trying to build. Except the paid ones are limited to what their parent publisher legally owns. Hers is limited to almost nothing. Alexandra still lives somewhere in Russia. She does not give her address. She does not do video interviews. She gives talks over Skype with the camera off. She runs the largest illegal library in human history from a laptop and a donation page. A graduate student who could not afford to read science built the system the entire scientific community now quietly depends on. The publishers have spent a decade trying to shut her down. She just shipped an AI that makes their entire business model outdated.

“The person is not a system of algorithms.” — Pope Leo XIV

This should be an international scandal. It completely invalidates the UN and its legitimacy.

“Anti-Palestinian racism is escalating across Australia, while institutions continue to look away. “These are not isolated incidents. This is systemic racism.”

Proof that Israel is deeply rattled by the Global Sumud Flotilla. They've paid Google to make Israeli propaganda and smears the top result.

Pope Leo XIV previews his encyclical by attacking Silicon Valley’s “unbridled promotion and implementation of technology at the expense of human dignity.”

This is what happens when you have a Defence establishment that fails time and time again, and relies on the unquestioning loyalty of Labor, the Coalition and One Nation. It is an expensive cult that thrives off public money and the gravy train of AUKUS.

I once sat on a night bus to Amsterdam next to an elderly Australian man who hadn’t spoken to anyone in 6 hours. Around 2 a.m., the bus stopped at a roadside rest area and he finally turned to me and said:

In the week that Israel expressed outrage at the notion it would ever abuse Palestinian detainees, here’s their security minister proudly posting actual evidence of Israel abusing detainees. Beyond parody.

Yes, the Ben-Gvir video is disgraceful. But that's not the issue. The (obvious) issue is that if that's how nonviolent European protesters are treated in public, any person with a brain can imagine how Palestinians are treated behind closed doors. *That* is the real scandal.

AFP urged to investigate IDF soldiers in Australia Australia risks becoming "safe haven" for war criminals, human rights groups warn. ‘“There cannot be one standard for some conflicts and another for a genocide in Gaza.”’ deepcutnews.com/p/afp-urged-to…

Brilliant. Raw hypocrisy.

This has historically been referred to as a "concentration camp."

Labor has to expel the Israeli ambassador. Newman has to go. He is lying. This is Chris O’Connor, father of Neve O’Connor, one of the 11 Australians who were on the humanitarian flotilla to Gaza that was detained by Israel. @AlboMP @AustralianLabor

The difference now is under Trump all this is happening openly. The horse trading and threats that occur normally in private.