Today's Liberal News

Will Biden Grant Leonard Peltier Clemency? Indigenous Leaders Plead, “Don’t Let Him Die in Prison”

After commuting the sentences of over 2,500 people imprisoned for nonviolent drug offenses, Joe Biden has set a record for most pardons and commutations by a U.S. president. But Indigenous political prisoner Leonard Peltier remains behind bars. Over 120 tribal leaders are calling on Biden to grant clemency to Peltier as one of his final acts in office, warning this may be the last opportunity Peltier has for freedom.

Gideon Levy & Mouin Rabbani on Ceasefire: “Netanyahu Will Do Everything Possible” to Kill It Later

Israel’s security cabinet has approved a long-awaited ceasefire deal with Hamas. If finalized, the ceasefire is expected to go into effect on Sunday. “The main challenge will be the second phase, and here there are many, many problems on the horizon,” says Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, who stresses the importance of also freeing the thousands of Palestinians held by Israel. “Again and again, Israelis always think that they are the only victims.

Pam Bondi, Trump’s Attorney General Pick, Has History of Corporate Lobbying and Election Denial

In her confirmation hearing Wednesday, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, refused to answer Democrats’ questions about maintaining the Department of Justice’s independence from the president and pursuing his personal vendettas. Bondi also avoided directly answering questions about Trump’s vow to pardon January 6 defendants and refused to say Trump definitively lost the 2020 election.

Trump Triggers a Crisis in Denmark—And Europe

What did Donald Trump say over the phone to Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, on Wednesday? I don’t know which precise words he used, but I witnessed their impact. I arrived in Copenhagen the day after the call—the subject, of course, was the future of Greenland, which Denmark owns and which Trump wants—and discovered that appointments I had with Danish politicians were suddenly in danger of being canceled.

America Is No Longer the Home of the Free Internet

Twenty years ago, my day job was researching internet censorship, and my side hustle was advising activist organizations on internet security. I tried to help journalists in China access the unfiltered internet, and helped demonstrators in the Middle East avoid having their online content taken down.
Back then, unfiltered internet meant “the internet as accessed from the United States,” and most censorship-circumvention strategies focused on giving someone in a censored country access to a U.S.

Biden’s Farewell

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 or watch full episodes here.
This week Joe Biden delivered his farewell address to the nation, in which he warned of the looming threat of unchecked power. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss the president’s speech as well as what to expect from Donald Trump’s inauguration.

How Americans Drink

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.
“Alcohol ambivalence has been with us for almost as long as alcohol,” my colleague Derek Thompson wrote this week. He notes that according to the Greek comic poet Eubulus, of the fourth century B.C.E.

What David Lynch Knew About the Weather

During the early days of COVID, I found myself living in Los Angeles, the city I grew up in, back in the San Fernando Valley, the flat sprawl of suburban conformity I’d run away from at 18. The Valley had always felt oppressively normal to me; it made me, as a weirdo, self-conscious. And now I was there again, this time missing the serendipitous weirdness of a New York City subway car, in which I could be subsumed.