Today's Liberal News

“We’re Responsible for This”: American Surgeons Return from Gaza, Call for End of U.S. Culpability in Genocide

We speak with two doctors who’ve just returned after two weeks at the European Hospital in Gaza. Dr. Feroze Sidhwa and Dr. Mark Perlmutter are co-authors of a new piece for Common Dreams titled “As Surgeons, We Have Never Seen Cruelty Like Israel’s Genocide in Gaza.” They describe a hospital “hanging on by a thread,” with the majority of patients being young children, and bombing targeted at Muslim Palestinians “concentrated at the time of evening prayer.

30 Years Later, Rwanda Genocide Shows Consequences of U.S. Refusal to Prevent Mass Killing

Rwanda is holding a week of commemorations to mark the 30th anniversary of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, a period of around 100 days in which up to 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed by Hutu militias while powerful countries, including the United States, stood by and refused to stop the mass killings. Shortly after the genocide, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame took power and has since ruled Rwanda with an iron fist, leading a harsh crackdown on the press and opposition groups.

Why Tax Filing Is Such a Headache

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.
Yes, the American tax code is complicated. But a web of other forces makes the country’s tax-filing system much trickier than it needs to be.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Clash of the patriarchs
Israeli rage reaches new levels.
In MAGA world, everything happens for a reason.

The Wasteland Is Waiting for You

The first Fallout game was released in 1997. I was (and am) an avid gamer, and when I played the inaugural entry in what would become a decades-long series, I saw immediately that it was different from almost anything else I’d encountered on the market. Its subtitle labeled it “a post nuclear role playing game,” but this was not the typical, fast-paced, “Radioactive Rambo” shoot-’em-up with an indestructible protagonist roaming a ravaged world to a pulsing electronic soundtrack.

America Is Sick of Swiping

Modern dating can be severed into two eras: before the swipe, and after. When Tinder and other dating apps took off in the early 2010s, they unleashed a way to more easily access potential love interests than ever before. By 2017, about five years after Tinder introduced the swipe, more than a quarter of different-sex couples were meeting on apps and dating websites, according to a study led by the Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld.

The Crumbleys Are Being Scapegoated for America’s Gun Failures

Yesterday, a Michigan judge sentenced James and Jennifer Crumbley to 10 to 15 years in prison for failing to stop their son Ethan from murdering four students in 2021. The cases grabbed headlines because prosecutors aggressively charged the parents with the actual killings, as though they had pulled the trigger themselves, rather than pressing lesser offenses such as child neglect and failure to comply with gun-safety laws. Separate juries had convicted them of manslaughter.

The 67-Hour Rule

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here.
One of the hard-and-fast laws of economics is that people in rich countries work less than their peers in poorer countries. The rule holds across nations. British and Japanese people work less on average than those in Mexico and India. It’s also true across history.

Breaking the Silence: Israeli Army Veterans Tour U.S. & Canada to Speak Out Against Occupation

Democracy Now! speaks with two former Israeli soldiers who are members of Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation group of Israeli army veterans. The group’s education director, Tal Sagi, describes growing up in a settlement and joining the military without understanding what occupation was. “We’ve been told that this is security and we have to control millions of lives and we don’t have other options,” says Sagi, who says Israeli society is not open to ending the occupation.

Israel’s Ultimate Goal Is to Make Gaza Unfit for Human Habitation: Middle East Analyst Mouin Rabbani

President Biden called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies in Gaza a “mistake” and urged Israel to call for a temporary ceasefire to allow in more aid in a televised interview on Tuesday. While Israel has pledged to open new aid crossings, the U.N. said on Tuesday that there has been “no significant change in the volume of humanitarian supplies entering Gaza,” and the Biden administration has not actually changed its policies or withheld any arms transfers to Israel.

Arizona Supreme Court Revives 1864 Abortion Ban Passed Before Women Could Even Vote

In a historic ruling, Arizona’s conservative Supreme Court has upheld an 1864 law banning almost all abortions in the state. The court sent out this warning: “Physicians are now on notice that all abortions, except those necessary to save a woman’s life, are illegal.” The 160-year-old law predates Arizona becoming a state and was passed decades before women could even vote.

From the Solar Eclipse to Global Heating, Dr. Peter Kalmus on the Importance of Science

Three of the most significant greenhouse gases contributing to global heating — carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide — reached new record highs again last year, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Global CO2 levels are now over 50% higher than they were before mass industrialization, due to the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation and livestock agriculture.

The Federal Judges Speaking Out Against Trump

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.
The federal judiciary may turn out to be an endangered democracy’s last line of defense.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
So you looked directly into the sun.