Officials Reveal a Secret Ruse to Evacuate Trump, and the F.D.A. Takes On a Food Safety Loophole

From The New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Tracey Mumford. Today's Tuesday, August 11th. Here's what we're covering. Why aren't you flying the new plane home? Say what? Why aren't you flying on the new Air Force One home? It's flying to Europe to one of the big bases, two or three of the big bases, where we can show it to the people. A few weeks ago, President Trump and his team announced a last-minute switch as he was leaving the NATO summit in Turkey. Instead of getting on the new Qatari-donated Air Force One that he'd taken to get there, he got onto an older Air Force One, amid reports that there were security concerns and that the newer plane hadn't been outfitted with the same defensive capabilities. His boarding was kind of rushed, and reporters who got on the older plane with him were told to pull their window shades down before taking off. The plane then flew to a military base in Britain, landed, and about 40 minutes later, Trump walked down the steps. But The Times has now learned this was all part of an elaborate deception. Two senior U.S. officials say that Trump didn't fly on the older Air Force One. Instead, after he boarded, he was then hidden in a large catering container that was lowered down from the other side of the plane and whisked away. They say he was actually flown to the U.K. base in a third plane. At that point, to complete the deception, Trump re-boarded the old Air Force One out of sight and proceeded to step out through the main door as he usually would. Reporters on that older plane were left to think they had been traveling with the president all along, making them unwitting protesters. The plane then flew to the U.K. base in Washington, D.C., and left the U.S. military base in Washington, D.C., to serve as unknowing decoys. The plan appears to have been developed in a matter of hours after officials determined that there had been a credible threat against the president from Iran, which borders Turkey. While it's an unusual case of the public being deceived about the president's whereabouts, one former Secret Service agent who worked in protective details for Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, said the agency had used decoy motorcades and flights in the past. In Washington yesterday, We don't even know exactly how many chemicals are in the food that Americans eat every day. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. proposed a new rule to close what experts have called a long-standing loophole in food safety. The food industry continues to develop. Novel compounds and chemical combinations that do not exist in nature. Since the 50s, food companies have been allowed to bypass requirements to get new ingredients reviewed by the government by saying that they are, quote, generally recognized as safe, a designation known as grass. That workaround was originally intended to apply to common ingredients like vinegar or baking soda. But over the decades, companies have used it to quietly introduce at least a thousand substances into their products, things like thickeners, extracts, and flavorings, with little evidence that they are safe. Now, under the Trump administration's new proposed rule, companies would have to tell the FDA about any new ingredients they plan to use and submit safety data. This is Kennedy's latest move to try and target processed foods, which he says are responsible for higher rates of obesity and chronic diseases in the U.S. Food policy experts say the proposed changes still leave a lot of wiggle room for food manufacturers. For example, companies would still be allowed to decide for themselves if they think a new ingredient is safe. And they wouldn't necessarily be required to submit any safety data for ingredients they're already using. Still, experts welcomed the effort to boost oversight of food manufacturers, with one telling the Times, quote, it's been the Wild West for them for long enough. This is Julie Turkowitz. I live in Bogota, and I woke up this morning, sat on my couch, and my apartment began to shake. I evacuated my building and soon realized that Colombia had just experienced a 7.4 magnitude earthquake. Julie is the Times' Andes bureau chief, who's been covering a powerful quake that hit Colombia on Monday, the strongest quake there in the past 10 years. While the earthquake took place in a rural area, there were sort of major population centers affected. This includes Cali, that's our largest city in the country. So far, we know that more than 100 people are dead. Buildings were flattened. I, just a couple of weeks ago, was covering the earthquakes in Venezuela. We saw many of the same scenes starting to play out in these cities in Colombia. People digging for their loved ones, civilians, rescue workers coming to the buildings and sort of trying with everything that they could to get survivors out. And one of the things that makes these earthquakes particularly devastating is that some of the same people that I met, I met covering the Venezuela quakes, had now moved to Cali, a place that they thought that they would be safe and, of course, experienced this horrifying event once again. Here in Taiwan on Monday, millions of people lost their usual internet access on their phones. It meant that for 30 minutes, they weren't able to download images. WhatsApp wouldn't work. Many other social media would not work. But all of this was deliberate. It was a deliberate shutdown by the government to give people some sense of what it would be like if China attacked Taiwan's telecommunications grid and tried to shut down communications on the phone and internet. My colleague Chris Buckley covers Taiwan and China for The Times. He says the simulated internet slowdown yesterday was part of annual exercises to prepare for a potential future Chinese attack. China has long insisted that the self-governed island of Taiwan is part of its territory. And while Chinese President Xi Jinping has said he hopes to absorb Taiwan peacefully, he has not ruled out taking it by force. We spoke to Taiwanese officials beforehand about the drill and they laid out two expectations that they hoped would come out of this exercise. First of all, it was very much a psychological exercise to remind Taiwanese people that easy access to 5G could easily be avoided. It could possibly be disruptive if China ever attacked Taiwan's telecommunication systems, including its undersea cables. The other less spoken part of the exercise was probably to test the telecommunication systems themselves. How did they respond when there was a slowdown? Did the emergency backup systems work as promised? So it was two levels, I think. Testing the public reaction and also testing the system reaction. Chris says that in addition to regular emergency drills for the public, Taiwan's military is also testing the system reaction. They're also strategizing about how to respond to a possible Chinese invasion. And to do that, it's trying to take a page from Ukraine. Taiwan has watched as Ukraine has waged a kind of David and Goliath defense against Russia, specifically by going all in on drones. The relatively cheap, easy-to-build technology has in some cases helped them hold their own against a much larger adversary. The Taiwanese government says that in the next five years, it wants to boost its drone production. to 100,000 drones per month. And finally, a few years ago, a project manager for a new electricity cable went on the news to talk about some work that was underway. Technical stuff. Crews were preparing to run an underwater cable to connect the electricity grids of Britain and Ireland. What he didn't realize was that he was a man about to unleash the deep, deep feelings of Harry Potter fans. The plan he was talking about called for running a cable under a beach in Wales, right where fans have built a shrine to Dobby the house elf, the loyal little sock-loving creature from the fantasy series. In the second-to-last Harry Potter movie, Dobby dies in Harry's arms, and they filmed his burial at the same site the electricity company was eyeing. We got hundreds of calls. I mean, hundreds of calls. I said, well, Tom, what are they on about? And they said, well, look, apparently we're going to go straight through Dobby's grave. And I said, Dobby? Who's Dobby? The project manager, who just revealed the full story of what happened on the podcast Energy Revolution, said after hearing from hundreds of people, including some children, they rerouted the multi-million dollar project. There were other factors at play, too, including that they had to dodge some actual archaeological remains from the Bronze Age, near the site. But in all, the project manager said he learned that even though Dobby is fiction, people's feelings. were very real. I think you've got to be flexible, agile, and thoughtful. And sometimes, you know what? A 10-year-old girl, she's right. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, how the war with Iran has left the United States with a dangerously low supply of munitions. You can listen to that in the New York Times app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tracey Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow. you