It’s Monday, August 24. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Bill Barr on the Democrats’ antisemitism denial. Kara Kennedy on why moms are filming themselves throwing ice at bathtubs. Robert Wright on AI’s real threat. And much more.
But first: The data that should’ve been front page news—but wasn’t.
Almost exactly a year ago to the day, my colleagues and I uncovered in The Free Press that a dozen of the most viral images presented as evidence of famine in Gaza in fact showed children with unrelated medical issues, including cystic fibrosis and autoimmune conditions.
The investigation earned me death threats, calls for me to be tried at The Hague, and jabs by a high-profile comedian on national TV—despite the fact that we’ve had to issue exactly zero corrections on our story. That wasn’t the case for three of the news organizations that had run the images, which either updated or corrected their work because of what we reported.
Our point was simply to tell readers that if there was a famine in Gaza, photographs of these children were not evidence of it.
What is indisputable today is that there is currently no famine in Gaza. That is the major finding from a UNICEF-led team that recently produced the most comprehensive and robust nutrition survey of Gaza since the war began. It found that, less than a year after a famine was declared in Gaza, the territory has one of the lowest malnutrition rates in the region. A recovery that swift is not just “miraculous,” in the words of a malnutrition researcher I spoke with—it raises questions in and of itself. Questions like: How can a war-torn territory go from famine to showing some of the lowest rates of child malnutrition in the region in less than a year?
In my report today, I investigate that question, its implications, and what it means for the debate over the official decision to classify a famine in Gaza to still be raging 12 months on.
—Olivia Reingold
|
|
The Battle over ‘Stars and Stripes’ |
|
 |
|
Last week, the Pentagon fired the editor, publisher, and a star correspondent of Stars and Stripes, the newspaper that has served American service members since the Civil War. The firings, which came just days after the paper published a story on the suffering of sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, suggest that the top brass wants to turn the publication into nothing more than a mouthpiece for the department. Read our editorial on the purge, and why our service men and women deserve better. | |
|
|
|
The Moms of TikTok Have Gone Insane |
|
 |
|
Moms are filming themselves sobbing while holding their babies, throwing ice in bathtubs, and declaring solidarity with Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother on trial for killing her three young children. If you are asking yourself what on earth is happening in the internet’s “momosphere,” Kara Kennedy is here to explain it all. | |
|
|
|
Bill Barr: Democrats Are in Denial About Campus Antisemitism |
|
 |
|
Last week, Rep. Jamie Raskin launched an investigation into what he calls the Justice Department’s “sham investigation” of antisemitism at elite universities. In our pages today, former attorney general William Barr accuses Raskin of “rewriting history.” Read Barr on what’s really going on at America’s top schools, and what might be behind Raskin’s politically convenient change of heart. | |
|
|
|
This Is How AI Starts a Nuclear War |
|
 |
|
What if the real threat from AI isn’t that the machine might turn on us, but that it will cause us to turn on each other? That’s the provocative question author and journalist Robert Wright tackles in his new book, “The God Test.” He sits down with Coleman Hughes on the latest episode of “Conversations with Coleman” to debate his unsettling doomsday thesis, and much more. | |
|
