Today's Liberal News

Gaza Takeover: Mouin Rabbani on Israel’s “Indefinite, Genocidal Military Campaign”

Israel’s security cabinet has announced the approval of a plan to occupy Gaza City, moving its ongoing military offensive north and displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians to camps in central Gaza. Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani emphasizes that the new strategy is simply “the first phase of a larger plan” for the permanent displacement, occupation and annexation of the entire Gaza Strip, as confirmed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a recent interview with Fox News.

The Global Plastic Threat: Research Finds Plastics Can Lead to Disease, Disability & Premature Death

Negotiations are underway in Geneva on a legally binding Global Plastics Treaty that has been in the works for several years, as the crisis of pollution from plastics worldwide has grown more acute. An estimated 8 billion metric tons of plastic waste now pollute the planet. Without changes, the production of plastic is expected to triple by 2060 — much of it driven by single-use plastics.

‘I’m Actually Surprised It Didn’t Happen Sooner’

When gunfire pelted the Atlanta-based headquarters of the CDC yesterday, hundreds of employees were inside the campus’s buildings. The experience was terrifying. But some of the employees were not particularly shocked. “I’m actually surprised it didn’t happen sooner,” a nearly 20-year veteran of the agency told me. (She, like others I spoke with for this article, requested anonymity out of fear of losing her job.)
This was, in one sense, the first attack of its kind on the CDC.

The Woman Who Perfected Flower Painting

If still-life painting is the art of arresting decay, then it makes a lot of sense that Rachel Ruysch grew up to become one of the greatest still-life painters in the history of art. In the 17th century, Frederik Ruysch, her father, was an internationally famous embalmer. His job was to make a natural object seem permanently alive and pleasing to the eye. He could transform the corpse of a bullet-pierced admiral into the “fresh carcase of an infant,” Samuel Johnson once said.

What to Expect From Trump’s Meeting With Putin

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.

A Beach Read Can Be Anything You Want It to Be

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
Conventional wisdom says that a beach read ought to be light and fun—a book with a pastel cover. But the beach read can be anything you want it to be. Vacation might feel like the perfect moment to escape into frivolity, or to dive into something dense that you finally have the mental space for.

An Unusual Way to End Up With a Whole Lot of Gold

Last month, a small company in San Francisco announced that it had a plan to manufacture gold—not merely a flake or a nugget, but tons of the stuff. According to a paper written by one of Marathon Fusion’s co-founders (and not yet peer reviewed), the alchemist’s dream could be achieved not by mixing powders in a crucible but by tweaking atoms that were superheated during the process of nuclear fusion. The gold wouldn’t be the end game, more like a side hustle.