The black-and-white video President Donald Trump released yesterday was, in some respects, familiar. The grainy clip, only 30 seconds long and taken from a U.S. aircraft, shows a small boat skipping across the waves, bracketed by crosshairs. The crosshairs move in closer. Seconds later, a missile explodes, engulfing the boat in fire and destroying everything and everyone on board.

This spring, months before the recent dramatic departures from the CDC, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. battled with the agency’s scientists during the very first public-health crisis of his tenure as health secretary. As measles tore through a remote community in West Texas, Kennedy waffled on the vaccine and promoted alternative remedies, such as vitamin A. So the CDC pushed back.

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Because the fatal shooting of Ashli Babbitt on January 6, 2021, was caught on camera, what happened isn’t really in doubt.
Babbitt, an Air Force veteran, was part of a crowd that stormed the U.S.

The Atlantic Festival includes Richard Ayoade, Ken Burns, Tom Hanks, Allison Janney, Arvind Krishna, David Letterman, Tekedra Mawakana, and Lt. General H.R. McMaster, plus screenings of The American Revolution, The Diplomat, The Lowdown, Dread Beat an Blood, and Love+War
The Atlantic is announcing new speakers for The Atlantic Festival, happening September 18–20 and located for the first time in New York City.

Derrick Hiebert had planned to stick it out at FEMA. He was an assistant administrator working on hazard mitigation—he specialized in getting communities prepared for disasters—and like many emergency-management experts I’ve spoken with, he thinks that the American approach to administering disasters needed an overhaul, even a radical one. The systems had gotten “clunky over time,” he said. Something needed to change. So Hiebert was open to seeing how President Donald Trump might change it.

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The Trump administration broke the law. Its officials knew they were breaking the law. And they’ll likely try to do so again.

The Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan was once known for his charming, sometimes surreal sitcoms—Father Ted, Black Books, The IT Crowd—on British TV. These days, however, he is better known for his online crusade against transgender activism. His X feed takes the same approach as Libs of TikTok, cherry-picking videos of criminals and fetishists in a full-scale assault on “gender ideology.”
He is obsessive and offensive. But is he a criminal? The British police seem to think so.

At their meeting in Beijing today, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin made a show of how close they’ve become. Putin and Xi, referring to each other as friends, praised the strength of their relationship as their two countries advanced an agreement to build a gas pipeline that would bind their economies even more tightly together.

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Dear James,
I’ve been married to my husband for 35 years. He is 88 and I’m 79. I was in love with him during our courtship.