Today's Liberal News

Why Wait 8 Months?

Updated at 8:15 p.m. ET on August 17, 2021At this point, COVID-19 booster shots seem all but guaranteed for Americans. Last night, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal reported that the White House plans to recommend a third dose of COVID-19 vaccine to most Americans who have already gotten two shots from Pfizer or Moderna. The news comes just five days after the FDA authorized third doses for people who have received organ transplants or have certain immune conditions.

Cuttlefish Break the Rules of Aging

Cuttlefish, with their blimp-shaped bodies and eight squiggly arms, don’t age like people do. Sexual maturity tends to come late for them—about three-quarters of the way through their two-year lives, the rough equivalent of a human hitting puberty in their 60s. The geriatric cephalopods will then spend several weeks on an absolute bender, coupling up with as many partners as they can.

The Coronavirus Is Here Forever. This Is How We Live With It.

In the 1980s, doctors at an English hospital deliberately tried to infect 15 volunteers with a coronavirus. COVID-19 did not yet exist—what interested those doctors was a coronavirus in the same family called 229E, which causes the common cold. 229E is both ubiquitous and obscure. Most of us have had it, probably first as children, but the resulting colds were so mild as to be unremarkable.

We Have One Last Chance to Save Our Allies

“This is not Saigon,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on CNN on Sunday—and he was right. By the time helicopters took off from Saigon rooftops in April 1975, the evacuation of endangered South Vietnamese had been going on for several weeks.

Damaged Hospitals in Haiti Struggle to Help Earthquake Survivors as Death Toll Tops 1,400

We get an update from Les Cayes, Haiti, not far from the epicenter of Saturday’s earthquake, as Tropical Storm Grace drenched parts of the country and the death toll has now climbed to more than 1,400, with nearly 7,000 suffering from injuries amid overwhelmed hospitals. The impact from the latest earthquake is “just as great” as the devastation from the 2010 earthquake, says Jacqueline Charles, Haiti and Caribbean correspondent for the Miami Herald.

Azmat Khan: Deadly U.S. Air War in Afghanistan Helped Taliban Gain New Recruits Who Wanted Revenge

Investigative journalist Azmat Khan, who has reported extensively in Afghanistan, says President Joe Biden has not yet addressed the chaos unleashed by the collapse of the Afghan government. In remarks on Monday, Biden “really focused on the decision to end the war” and ignored criticism about chaos at the Kabul airport and the abandonment of thousands of Afghans who helped the U.S. over the last 20 years. “None of that was really discussed in any detail,” Khan says.

Ret. Col. Ann Wright on Reopening U.S. Embassy in Kabul in 2001 & Why She Supports Troop Withdrawal

Retired U.S. Army colonel and former State Department official Ann Wright, who helped reopen the U.S. Embassy in Kabul in December 2001 and later resigned in protest, says the United States should reopen its embassy now and needs to maintain a diplomatic footprint in Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover. “If the United States really wants to help the people of Afghanistan … we’ve got to have a presence in Afghanistan,” says Wright.

Afghan Scholar: The U.S. Can’t Distance Itself from Chaos Unfolding Now After 20 Years of War

Thousands of Afghans who worked for the United States and other foreign countries remain stranded in Kabul two days after the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan. Military flights out of the Kabul International Airport have resumed a day after thousands of Afghans raced to the airport with hopes of leaving the country. President Joe Biden has defended his decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan after 20 years of occupation and criticized the U.S.