As The Atlantic continues a major expansion of its editorial team, we are announcing that Tom Bartlett begins today as a staff writer covering health and science under the second Trump administration. Recently, Tom has covered the measles outbreak in West Texas, speaking with a parent of the first child to die of the disease in America in a decade and reporting on what RFK Jr. told grieving families about the measles vaccine.
A Marco Rubio impostor is using AI voice to call high-level officials
The unknown individual contacted at least five government officials, including three foreign ministers, a U.S. governor, and a member of Congress, according to a State Department cable.
Civil servants told POLITICO they’re anxious and exhausted, but holding out hope their lawyers can still save their jobs.
A clear pattern has emerged in the extended back-and-forth over the legality of many Trump-administration actions. Donald Trump or a member of his Cabinet takes a certain step—say, firing an official protected from such removal, or destroying a government agency established by Congress, or seeking to ship a group of immigrants off to a country where they may be tortured or killed. Then, a lawsuit is quickly filed seeking to block the administration.
The CDC says cases have reached nearly 1,300, the most since 1992.
The largest municipal workers’ strike in decades in the city of Philadelphia has ended after 9,000 members of AFSCME District Council 33, who are primarily sanitation workers, walked off the job a week ago. Growing piles of trash on the streets of Philadelphia brought the strike into clear view for city residents. Labor historian Francis Ryan says the workers won “the hearts of a lot of Philadelphians” with a popular social media campaign.
The first trial in a case challenging the Trump administration’s policy of detaining and deporting international students and professors who participate in pro-Palestinian activism is underway in Boston. The American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association brought the lawsuit. Government lawyers tried to get it dismissed, but U.S.
Ukraine’s Air Force says Russia launched its largest aerial attack overnight since its 2022 full-scale invasion, firing a record 741 drones and missiles, most of them targeting the city of Lutsk in western Ukraine. The barrage prompted Poland to activate its air defenses and scramble fighter jets. Russia’s attack came after President Trump on Tuesday sharply criticized Vladimir Putin in his latest in a series of U-turns on Ukraine policy.
President Trump met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House for a second straight day Tuesday, as Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, claimed Israel and Hamas were nearing a breakthrough on a ceasefire agreement.
After the tariff turmoil of months ago, what do we make of the big upswings we’re seeing in the markets?
Chase and Amex are about to spike their annual fees. It’ll drive away customers. That’s the point.
For decades, the state’s landmark environmental law made it easy to block home construction. A new law changes that.
It seeks information on employees who quit or faced discipline during the Biden administration for refusing to execute DEI orders, according to an email obtained by POLITICO.
They say the decision “erodes trust” by pitting providers against federal recommendations that aren’t grounded in evidence.
President Donald Trump has targeted undocumented immigrants, but the GOP bill will bar those who played by the rules from subsidized care, too.
The politics of the party have shifted, with more of the GOP base reliant on welfare programs. But policy hasn’t followed.
Six Republicans said big cuts to the low-income health insurance program were unacceptable. Now they have to vote.
The Waves also discusses the Riverside Church controversy and the case of Sarah Milov.
What we say matters, especially depending on whom we say it to.
The Waves also discusses the case against Jeffrey Epstein and Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is in Trouble.
The president’s approval rating had been ticking upward since its biggest drop in April.
The General Services Administration, which oversees government contracting, is leading a review of more than 20,000 consulting agreements for what is “non-essential.
The crowded contest in the Garden State shows how hard it is to address pocketbook issues.
The year is 2025, and an AI model belonging to the richest man in the world has turned into a neo-Nazi. Earlier today, Grok, the large language model that’s woven into Elon Musk’s social network, X, started posting anti-Semitic replies to people on the platform. Grok praised Hitler for his ability to “deal with” anti-white hate.
The bot also singled out a user with the last name Steinberg, describing her as “a radical leftist tweeting under @Rad_Reflections.
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In the early hours of July 4, the Guadalupe River flooded. Heavy rainfall, enhanced by atmospheric moisture leftover from a recent tropical storm, dumped water across parts of central Texas. By 6:10 a.m., a gauge in Hunt, a community in Kerr County, measured that the river had become a 37.
Before the waters of Texas’s Guadalupe River rose more than 33 feet over the course of five hours, the National Weather Service sent out a series of alerts. The first one that included Kerr County, where most of the fatalities would ultimately take place, warned of “considerable” flood threat and went out just after 1 a.m. on July 4. It triggered push alerts on people’s phones. It set off alarms on any weather radio tuned to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s frequency.
In most Superman movies (and there’ve been a fair few of them over the decades), no one else like Superman exists. The blue-and-red-costumed Kryptonian is typically unique in our world—an alien god plopped into an unfamiliar society, inspiring both reverence and fear. Not so in this latest iteration, the character’s first solo movie in 12 years.
The story unfolds so rapidly that it can all seem, at a glance, preordained. After transferring to Columbia last fall, as Chungin “Roy” Lee tells it, he used AI to cheat his way through school, used AI to cheat his way through internship interviews at Amazon and Meta—he received offers from both—and in the winter broadcasted his tool on social media. He was placed on probation, suspended, and, more keen on AI than education, dropped out this spring to found a start-up.
