Today's Liberal News

Trump Needs the UN in Gaza

Immediately after Hamas and Israel agreed to the first phase of President Donald Trump’s peace plan, food and medical supplies were supposed to start flooding into the Gaza Strip. Like other key aspects of the agreement, that influx did not go exactly as planned. Some food, fuel, medical supplies, and other resources are moving, but the flow of aid remains clogged.

The Military’s Missile Defense System Cannot Be as Good as It Says

The Defense Department is notoriously picky about films that depict military and national-security issues, and understandably so. Many movies that feature the military get a lot of things wrong, including innocent flaws such as actors who are the wrong age for the rank on their costume, or scripts that invent procedures or terms that don’t exist.

Today’s Atlantic Trivia

It’s said that the 17th- and 18th-century polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was the last person to know everything. He was a whiz at philosophy, law, logic, science, engineering, politics—the works. But there was also simply less to know back then; the post–Industrial Revolution knowledge explosion killed the universal genius.
Which is to say that I bet Leibniz wouldn’t know the full oeuvre of K-pop if he were alive today.

No One Actually Knows What a Moon Is

In August, an amateur French astronomer, Adrien Coffinet, messaged an email list dedicated to asteroid and comet research with an announcement. He’d identified a new quasi-moon: “2025 PN7 seems to be a quasi-satellite of the Earth,” he wrote. Last week, news of the quasi-moon went mainstream, as a surge of headlines declared that Earth officially had a second moon.
This isn’t exactly right: As several scientists reiterated to me, Earth still only has one real moon.

Jeremy Scahill on Gaza “Ceasefire,” Talking to Hamas & Israel’s Doctrine of Dehumanizing Palestinians

Israel has carried out repeated attacks in Gaza and killed about 100 Palestinians over the past two weeks since the U.S.-backed ceasefire deal with Hamas came into effect. Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of Drop Site News, is one of the few Western journalists in regular contact with Hamas leaders. “It’s utter malpractice on the part of all of these news organizations that have not regularly been interviewing the leaders, the negotiators of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.