Today's Liberal News

Trump’s Secret Plane Switch: An Israeli Tip, CIA Doubts & Reporters Put at Risk

The Washington Post reported Monday that due to an alleged Iranian threat to assassinate President Trump, he secretly swapped planes before departing the July NATO summit in Turkey — leaving senior administration officials, staff and members of the press corps on board.
“The Israelis passed a tip, a concern, that the plane and potentially the president was under threat,” says Dan Lamothe, one of the Washington Postreporters who broke the story.

Bryan Stevenson on the “Enduring Evil of Slavery” and Trump’s Attempt to Rewrite History

We spend the hour with civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. In 2018, the organization opened the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, to tell the history of millions of enslaved Africans who were abducted and trafficked across the Atlantic to the Americas by European powers, and to chronicle the legacy of slavery, racism, lynchings and segregation in the United States.

Actor Wagner Moura on Brazil’s Dictatorship, Bolsonaro & “A Trial — after An Enemy of the People”

We continue our coverage from the Edinburgh International Festival, where acclaimed Brazilian actor and filmmaker Wagner Moura stars in the play A Trial — after An Enemy of the People. A sequel to the 1882 Henrik Ibsen play An Enemy of the People, A Trial — after An Enemy of the People interrogates themes of authoritarianism, misinformation and public judgement. It is directed by Brazil’s Christiane Jatahy.
“We in Brazil, we know what a dictatorship is.

The Flawed Logic of Trump’s Airplane Escape

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.
One of the more charming moments in the deliriously charming 1964 Beatles movie, A Hard Day’s Night, has the boys in the band trying to evade screaming fans and the paparazzi.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Convenient Truth

At this stage in the AI race, if one of your chatbots hasn’t escaped the lab and run amok, people start to wonder whether you’re even serious. Last month, OpenAI and then Anthropic disclosed that their models had hacked other companies’ systems during internal testing. When Meta confirmed last week that one of its bots had also gone rogue, the news barely registered as an aftershock.

It May Be Time to Panic About AI

The crisis began quietly, on September 12, 2024. That was the day OpenAI announced a new sort of bot, known as a “reasoning model,” that was trained to complete challenging tasks that took long periods of time—the very sorts of science, math, and coding problems the AI industry had long prized. Google, Anthropic, DeepSeek, and the like raced to launch their own reasoning models.

Photos: The Total Solar Eclipse of 2026

Ander Gillenea / AFP / Getty
The sun’s corona glows as the moon completely blocks the sun during the totality phase of the total solar eclipse, as seen from San Asensio, La Rioja region, Spain, on August 12, 2026.Bernat Armangue / AP
Mario Garrido, a member of the “Los Taraos” amateur astrophotography group, waits to shoot a total solar eclipse, in Berlanga de Duero, Spain, on August 12, 2026.

AOC Knows a Lemon When She Sees One

Last night, Francesca Hong lost the race to be the Democratic candidate for governor of Wisconsin. This is great news for American democracy.
Sorry if that seems harsh—she certainly ran an energetic campaign and came close to winning the nomination—but Hong was a profoundly flawed candidate in an important race. Even the leaders of her own faction of the Democratic Party recognized it, and stayed away: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders apparently know a lemon when they see one.

Gaza Tribunal Co-Chairs MP Jeremy Corbyn, Neve Gordon & Shahd Hammouri on U.K. Complicity in Genocide

From London, we revisit the Gaza Tribunal, an independent, nongovernmental inquiry into the United Kingdom’s complicity in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. The tribunal, held nearly one year ago, was chaired by our three guests: former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, Israeli professor of human rights law Neve Gordon and Palestinian legal scholar Shahd Hammouri. Their new book is titled The Gaza Tribunal: Britain’s Complicity in Genocide.