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.Is RFK Jr., the conspiracist scion of American political royalty, merely a nuisance, or will he present a genuine threat in 2024?First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
China changed its mind about World War II.
Ryan Kelley, a onetime Republican front-runner for Michigan governor, is instead headed to prison.
With his trip to Israel tomorrow, Joe Biden will become the second American president to travel abroad to an active war zone that is not controlled by his own military. The first was also Joe Biden. When he ventured to Kyiv last February, he arrived during a lull in the fighting. This time, he’s flying into an escalating conflict.
Updated at 3:46 p.m. ET on October 17, 2023On Friday, immediately after nominating Representative Jim Jordan as their latest candidate for speaker, House Republicans took a second, secret-ballot vote. The question put to each lawmaker was simple: Would you support Jordan in a public vote on the House floor?The results were not encouraging for the pugnacious Ohioan. Nearly a quarter of the House Republican conference—55 members—said they would not back Jordan.
A truism of national security is that leaders constantly face a dilemma in which neither choice is good. In wartime especially, that choice can be excruciating. Today, Israel’s leaders confront just such a challenge: hostages.Hamas has imposed a war on Israel, one set in motion by the gruesome atrocities committed by the Gaza-based Islamist group.
Certain books have the potential to extend beyond their covers: They can affect readers so dramatically that they spur change, whether in readers’ heads or across society. Some of these titles are well known.
President Biden will visit Israel on Wednesday in an unprecedented show of support for the country following last week’s surprise attack by Hamas that killed over 1,400 Israelis, including many civilians. The United States continues to rush ammunition, air defenses and other weaponry to Israel ahead of a possible Israeli ground invasion of Gaza. To end this conflict, former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy says, the U.S.
Israeli soldiers and settlers have cracked down on the occupied West Bank since Hamas’s shocking attack on Israel on October 7, killing at least 55 and arresting over 700 Palestinians, including several prominent lawmakers. “People are worried. All of this is unprecedented,” says Sari Bashi, program director at Human Rights Watch in Ramallah. Bashi is co-founder of Israeli human rights group Gisha, which works against apartheid policies that affect Palestinians, and urges U.
We go to Gaza City to speak with Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza, who is refusing to move south after Israel’s evacuation order. “Why should we be good victims for criminals who do war crimes [in] the daylight in front of the whole world, and the world is watching?” asks Sourani, who says there are no safe havens in Gaza, but social solidarity is high among survivors. “They can bomb us. They can kill us.
Abortion opponents have lost every state referendum since Roe was overturned. In Ohio, they’re wooing students, Black communities and even abortion rights advocates to turn their fortunes around.
Michael McCaul’s family has felt the pain of the drug overdose crisis first hand
Europeans are reconsidering standards of care, but aren’t nearly as hostile to treatment as many Republicans in the U.S.
A handful of pharmacies are offering the pills 10 months after the Biden administration allowed them to do so.
The slew of cases has alarmed legal experts, patient advocates and former health officials from both parties who say the consequences for the health care system — from drugmakers to nurses to patients — could be dire.
The new strategy UAW President Shawn Fain announced Friday signaled the strike could start having broader implications for the economy.
Democrats are loving the Biden economy. They’re less certain about his economic message.
The former Missouri Democratic senator warned how he could suffer at the hands of the “crazy caucus” of House Republicans.
“We wouldn’t let people come in from certain countries where there’s tremendous terror.
President Joe Biden will travel to Israel on Wednesday to show support for the U.S. ally as concerns increase that the raging Israel-Hamas war could expand into a larger regional conflict.
The former president falsely claimed that fly paper is no longer for sale “because of cruelty to animals.
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.Democracies overseas are under siege, and some Americans think the United States should stay out of those struggles. But supporting our friends and allies against barbarism is both in our national interest and part of our identity as a people.
The Israeli government said Hamas “accidentally” posted the video. But the Palestinian journalist behind the footage says otherwise.
The future of driverless cars in America is a promotional booth with a surfboard and a movie director’s clapboard. Robotaxis have officially arrived in Los Angeles, and last week, residents lined up in Santa Monica’s main promenade to get a smartphone code needed to ride them. For now, the cars, from the Alphabet-owned start-up Waymo, won’t leave the tame streets of Santa Monica.
When Judge Tanya Chutkan of the federal district court for D.C. was assigned the trial of Donald Trump for his attempt to steal the election, according to the journalist Robert Draper, she asked a friend to pray for her. Chutkan’s decision today to impose a gag order on the former president, her most consequential pronouncement in the case so far, shows why she’ll need prayer, if not outright divine wisdom, to navigate the challenge before her.
In the early 1990s, while studying preeclampsia in Guadeloupe, Pierre-Yves Robillard hit upon a realization that seemed to shake the foundations of his field. Preeclampsia, a pregnancy complication that causes some 500,000 fetal deaths and 70,000 maternal deaths around the world each year, had for decades been regarded as a condition most common among new mothers, whose bodies were mounting an inappropriate attack on a first baby.
Thirty-four years ago, in June 1989, Poland woke up to a surprise. Despite a voting process rigged to favor the Communist Party, despite decades of propaganda supporting Communists and smearing anti-Communists, despite the regime’s control of the army, the police, and the secret police, the democratic opposition won, taking all of the seats that it was allowed to contest.
At least 12 journalists, mostly Palestinians, have been killed over the past 10 days of conflict in and around the Gaza Strip. Sherif Mansour of the Committee to Protect Journalists says it is one of the highest death tolls for journalists covering the conflict since 1992 and calls today it the “deadliest time for journalists in Gaza.
On Friday, an Israeli shell reportedly landed among a group of international journalists covering clashes on Lebanon’s border with Israel, killing Reuters videographer Issam Abdallah and injuring six others. We speak to Abdallah’s close friend Lama Al-Arian, an international producer for Vice News in Beirut, who says colleagues believe that Abdallah’s death was the result of a “targeted attack.
Raz Segal, an Israeli expert in modern genocide, calls Israel’s assault on Gaza a textbook case of “intent to commit genocide” and its rationalization of its violence a “shameful use” of the lessons of the Holocaust. Israeli state exceptionalism and comparisons of its Palestinians victims to “Nazis” are used to “justify, rationalize, deny, distort, disavow mass violence against Palestinians,” says Segal.
The death toll from Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has topped 2,700, including more than 1,000 Palestinian children. As the humanitarian crisis worsens, we get an update from Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, who says conditions in Gaza are dire, as Israel has cut off access to electricity and safe water, and many disabled and ill residents are physically unable to obey the evacuation order.