Morning Report

TODAY’S INTERNATIONAL story

Israel retrieves final hostage’s body from Gaza

What happened
The Israeli government yesterday announced it had recovered the remains of Ran Gvili, a 24-year-old police officer killed fighting Hamas militants during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack. The return of Gvili’s body marks the “first time since 2014 that there are no Israeli hostages,” living or dead, being held in the Gaza Strip, CNN said.

Who said what
“Completing the recovery of Israel’s fallen paves the way for the next phase” of President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan, The New York Times said. That includes opening the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza, “allowing Palestinians who fled the enclave to return home for the first time.” Gvili’s family had “urged” the Israeli government to delay the second phase “until his remains were recovered and returned,” The Associated Press said.

Israel must now “complete the implementation of all the terms of the ceasefire agreement in full,” Hamas said in a statement, “without any reduction or delay.” The “next phase is disarming Hamas and demilitarizing the Gaza Strip,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday. He called the recovery of Gvili’s remains “an incredible achievement” for Israel and its soldiers. Hamas “worked very hard to get the body back” in collaboration with Israel, Trump told Axios. “Now we have to disarm Hamas like they promised.”

What next?
Israel said yesterday it would reopen the Rafah crossing in the “next days,” but only for foot traffic. There is “a great deal of skepticism in Israel and the region that Hamas will peacefully disarm,” Axios said, and that “Netanyahu will show restraint and let the process play out.”

TODAY’S ELECTIONS Story

Judge tosses Trump petition for Oregon voter rolls

What happened
A federal judge in Oregon yesterday rejected a Trump administration lawsuit seeking to compel the state to turn over its unredacted voter files. U.S. District Judge Mustafa Kasubhai dismissed the case after a hearing on “the basis and the purpose” of the Justice Department’s voter data demands in light of a letter from Attorney General Pam Bondi to Minnesota on Saturday linking its voter rolls to bringing “back law and order” and “an end to the chaos in Minnesota.” State officials called the letter, sent to Gov. Tim Walz (D) shortly after Border Patrol agents shot dead Alex Pretti, a “shakedown” and a “ransom note.”

Who said what
The Justice Department sued at least 23 states, including Oregon and Minnesota, last year after they refused to turn over detailed voter data including birth dates, driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. Earlier this month, a federal judge in Georgia dismissed one such suit on procedural grounds, while a federal judge in California threw out the request as “unprecedented and illegal.”

Almost every state has a “public version of its voter roll,” but traditionally, no one can obtain the “complete, unredacted” version, “not even the Justice Department,” The New York Times said. The Trump administration’s “highly unusual” effort raised alarms “because the Constitution dictates that elections are run mainly by individual states, not the administration in Washington,” and because the effort was “led by Trump allies who long falsely claimed” he won the 2020 election, “raising concerns that the data could be used to cast doubt on future election results.”

What next?
Kasubhai said he had “great concerns” about the administration’s motives regarding raw voter data but was denying its petition because the Justice Department had failed to state an adequate legal rationale.

It’s not all bad

Johns Hopkins University and Imperial College London researchers have developed a new way to track falling space debris using existing earthquake sensors. These sensors can also detect sonic booms from objects re-entering the atmosphere, and that data allows scientists to quickly estimate where hazardous debris may land. This low-cost, scalable approach could help authorities respond faster to contamination risks, recover toxic materials more effectively and better understand how growing space activity affects the planet.

Under the radar

Earth and the moon linked by a magnetic bridge

The moon is apparently chock-full of Earth’s history. Our planet’s atmosphere “contributes significantly” to the presence of substances like water and nitrogen found in moon dust, said a study published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

The magnetic field that surrounds Earth “may help guide atmospheric particles” into space and toward the moon, the University of Rochester said in a news release on the findings. As a result, “lunar soil may not only hold a long-term record of Earth’s atmosphere,” but “could be even more valuable than scientists once thought for future space explorers living and working on the moon.”

Soil brought back from the Apollo missions in the 1970s contained volatile substances, including “water, carbon dioxide, helium, argon and nitrogen,” said the release. While some of these volatiles came from the “sun’s constant stream of charged particles, known as the solar wind,” the amounts of the substances were “too high to be explained” by that alone. In this study, said Live Science, computer simulations showed that “the magnetic field lines within Earth’s tail act as invisible highways for charged particles,” moving these “atmospheric ions” toward the moon.

The elements in moon dust could be harvested and used in lunar bases. Substances like water and nitrogen may be “used for life support or fuel production, thereby reducing the need to bring everything from Earth and making a sustainable human presence more feasible,” said Techno-Science.net. Researchers have also conceptualized a device that could turn moon dust into usable water and oxygen, according to a study published in the journal Joule.

On this day

January 27, 1945

Soviet soldiers liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, freeing the roughly 7,000 prisoners who were still alive. The Nazis murdered more than a million people at Auschwitz, and its liberation date is now commemorated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

TODAY’S newspaperS

‘Retreat in Minnesota’

“President weighs retreat in Minnesota,” an “American city at war with the U.S. government,” The Wall Street Journal says on Tuesday’s front page. “State seeks ‘invasion relief,’” The Minnesota Star Tribune says. “Trump agrees to reduction in immigration force in Minneapolis,” the Chicago Tribune says. “ICE heats up Maine primary for U.S. Senate,” The Boston Globe says. “ICE endangers strides made in local policing,” USA Today says. “Shutdown looms over ICE budget,” the Los Angeles Times says. “Morale sinks at ICE and Border Patrol,” The New York Times says, while “economic fear running deep” among Americans. Trump, who “has long derailed his own economic message,” to “revisit the topic of prices,” says The Washington Post.

► See the newspaper front pages

Tall tale

Keeping the faith

For four years, a woman in the Philippines prayed before a Shrek figurine, thinking it was a Buddha statue. The 3D-printed Shrek had a “round shape and gentle expression,” and the unidentified woman placed it on her home altar and “treated it with great reverence,” said the South China Morning Post. After a friend finally told her that this was a fictional green ogre, not Buddha, the woman laughed and decided to keep the Shrek statue, arguing that “faith with good intentions mattered more than appearances.”

Morning Report was written and edited by Nadia Croes, Catherine Garcia, Scott Hocker, Anya Jaremko-Greenwold, Justin Klawans, Rafi Schwartz, Peter Weber and Kari Wilkin, with illustrations by Stephen Kelly and Julia Wytrazek.