This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Guantánamo Bay “Forever” Prisoner Speaks Out — to Praise Congress, Lindsey Graham, and Thomas Friedman — Murtaza Hussain: “My faith in many US politicians and media outlets has recently risen dramatically, because of their courageous stand against the Saudi royals,” al-Sharbi conveyed in letters and communications submitted through normal processes at the prison, and provided exclusively to The Intercept. “The Saudi royal family overtly fights terrorism to please the West, while covertly supporting it to please the clerics and others. They also do this so that they are always desperately needed by the United States and the West.” […] “I’m not blindly optimistic that the change of position by the likes of Senator Lindsay Graham and Thomas Friedman regarding the Saudi royals is not merely pragmatic flip-flopping. I hope that it is a truly ethical correction on their parts,” al-Sharbi stated.
• Death By 1,000 Clicks: Where Electronic Health Records Went Wrong — Fred Schulte and Erika Fry, Kaiser Health News and Fortune: Electronic health records were supposed to do a lot: make medicine safer, bring higher-quality care, empower patients, and yes, even save money. Boosters heralded an age when researchers could harness the big data within to reveal the most effective treatments for disease and sharply reduce medical errors. Patients, in turn, would have truly portable health records, being able to share their medical histories in a flash with doctors and hospitals anywhere in the country — essential when life-and-death decisions are being made in the ER. But 10 years after President Barack Obama signed a law to accelerate the digitization of medical records — with the federal government, so far, sinking $36 billion into the effort — America has little to show for its investment. KHN and Fortune spoke with more than 100 physicians, patients, IT experts and administrators, health policy leaders, attorneys, top government officials and representatives at more than a half-dozen EHR vendors, including the CEOs of two of the companies. The interviews reveal a tragic missed opportunity: Rather than an electronic ecosystem of information, the nation’s thousands of EHRs largely remain a sprawling, disconnected patchwork. Moreover, the effort has handcuffed health providers to technology they mostly can’t stand and has enriched and empowered the $13-billion-a-year industry that sells it.
• Google is eating our mail — Tomaž Šolc: Unfortunately, email is starting to become synonymous with Google's mail, and Google's machines have decided that mail from my server is simply not worth receiving. Being a good administrator and a well-behaved player on the network is no longer enough. […] Since mid-December last year, I'm regularly seeing SMTP errors like these. Sometimes the same message re-sent right away will not bounce again. Sometimes rephrasing the subject will fix it. Sometimes all mail from all accounts gets blocked for weeks on end until some lucky bit flips somewhere and mail mysteriously gets through again. Since many organizations use Gmail for mail hosting this doesn't happen just for ...@gmail.com addresses. Now every time I write a mail I wonder whether Google's AI will let it through or not. Only when something like this happens you realize just how impossible it is to talk to someone on the modern internet without having Google somewhere in the middle.