Today's Liberal News

U.N. Votes Overwhelmingly to Denounce U.S. Embargo on Cuba as Hurricane Melissa Batters Island

The United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to condemn the U.S. embargo on Cuba for the 33rd consecutive year, with just seven opposed, including the United States, Israel and Ukraine. The vote came as Cuba was battered by Hurricane Melissa, causing widespread damage.
We get an update from the eastern Cuban province of Santiago de Cuba with Liz Oliva Fernández, a reporter with Belly of the Beast, who says the U.S.

Mass Killings Reported in Sudan as RSF Seizes El Fasher; 460 Killed at Hospital

Sudan’s military is accusing the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces of killing at least 2,000 people since seizing control of El Fasher in the Darfur region, including some 460 at the Saudi Maternity Hospital. Meanwhile, tens of thousands have fled.
“What’s happening is no less than a … campaign of destruction and annihilation,” says Mathilde Vu, Sudan advocacy manager at the Norwegian Refugee Council, speaking to Democracy Now! from Kenya.

“Extraordinarily Destabilizing Decision”: Trump Denounced over Call to Immediately Resume Nuclear Tests

President Trump has directed the Pentagon to resume testing nuclear weapons for the first time since 1992. He made the announcement just before meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping to discuss trade relations. Dr. Ira Helfand, former president of Physicians for Social Responsibility and a leading campaigner against nuclear proliferation, says the White House needs to “clarify” Trump’s intentions, and urges countries to recommit to nuclear disarmament.

Trump Is Very Confused About Nuclear Weapons

Just before heading to his meetings with the leader of China, the president of the United States issued some comments about nuclear weapons, or “nuclear,” as he tends to call them. He wants to resume nuclear bomb tests, something no nuclear state except North Korea has done since the last century.

China Is Building the Future

After a months-long trade war between China and the United States, Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping are scheduled to meet Thursday in Korea. Both countries seem to be angling for a truce; over the weekend, they announced a “framework” for a possible agreement.
The negotiations offer an occasion to stop to consider how China went from technological backwater to superpower in less than half a lifetime, and an opportunity for the United States to learn from that success. U.S.

The Deadline for a Major Shutdown Casualty

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Two weeks ago, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned that the ongoing government shutdown was “starting to cut into muscle.

Today’s Atlantic Trivia

Updated with new questions at 6:10 p.m. ET on October 29, 2025.
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.

A Writer Who Did What Hillbilly Elegy Wouldn’t

Urbana, Ohio, is a small city of 11,000, where nearly three out of four voters went for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. The journalist Beth Macy, who in her previous books chronicled the widening fissures in American society by examining the opioid crisis and the aftereffects of globalization, grew up there. In Paper Girl, she returns to Urbana—a place beset by economic decline, dwindling public resources, failing schools, and the disappearance of local journalism.

Hurricanes Should Be Named After Fossil Fuel Firms: Mikaela Loach, Jamaican British Climate Activist

Jamaica remains in a state of emergency after being battered by Hurricane Melissa, one of the strongest Atlantic cyclones in history. The Category 5 storm slammed into Jamaica on Tuesday with 185-mile-per-hour winds, and the extent of the damage is not yet known because communication remains limited. Mikaela Loach, a Jamaican British climate justice activist, says the hurricane was “caused by the climate crisis,” and says fossil fuel companies are to blame.