As the Democratic National Convention kicked off its virtual roll-call vote this morning, the Uncommitted movement—an organization that successfully pushed thousands of primary voters to choose no one instead of casting a ballot for President Joe Biden because of US backing of Israel during its war on Gaza—called on the party to let a member of their delegation speak. 

The movement would like a five-minute speaking slot for a humanitarian aid worker who has recently returned from Gaza. Abbas Alawieh, an Uncommitted organizer, said at this morning’s press conference that the delegates from his group communicated this request to the DNC via email “maybe a month ago.” They have not yet received a response. 

Nationwide, as previously reported in Mother Jones, the Uncommitted movement earned over 700,000 votes—and 30 delegates to the convention. As we wrote:

The movement’s impact was notable, especially in swing states: 13 percent of voters in Michigan, just under 19 percent in Minnesota, and just below 15 percent in North Carolina voted “uncommitted.” In Illinois, a state without an “uncommitted” option on the ballot, voters wrote in “Gaza.”

Joe Biden continues to insist he’s continuing with his presidential campaign, but the list of Democrats pleading with him to drop out of the race keeps growing.

A dozen Congressional Democrats called on him to step aside on Friday—the largest single number in one day, according to the Washington Post.

That included Democrats in some of the party’s most competitive races, whose contests will help decide which party controls Congress next year.

Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, who is locked in a tight race for re-election, on Friday became the fourth Democratic senator calling for Biden to step down. “I agree with the many Ohioans who have reached out to me,” Brown said in a statement. “I think the President should end his campaign.”

In February, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, fresh out of a landslide reelection victory, was welcomed at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) with a standing ovation. “You’re a true leader,” an audience member shouted as he took the stage and tried to talk over cheers and cries of “We love you, papa.”

He warned the CPAC crowd: “Dark forces are already taking over your country. You may not see it yet, but it’s already happening.”

Bukele, who has fashioned himself as the “world’s coolest dictator” and a “Philosopher King,” has become a darling of US conservatives because of his iron fist rulings and draconian crackdown on crime and gangs. After a trip to El Salvador in 2023, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) praised Bukele and the country as a “bright spot” in the region. And just last month, Tucker Carlson attended Bukele’s inauguration alongside Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), and Donald Trump Jr. 

“Nayib Bukele locks up the gangs, throws out the corrupt judges, unapologetically embraces God, and rebukes globalism with facts and results,” Gaetz posted on X. “He is beloved by his people, and an inspiration to the Western World.”

The fate of gender-affirming care for transgender youth in Ohio will soon rest in one person’s hands. For the past week, Franklin County Judge Michael Holbrook has heard a case challenging a recent state law that includes a ban on the use of puberty blockers and hormones for trans youth. Now, it’s up to him to decide whether to turn a temporary block on the law into a permanent one—which would make Ohio just the third state to do so as a growing body of anti-trans laws moves through the courts.

From his chambers on the fifth floor of a downtown Columbus courthouse, the judge has heard pleas from the parents of trans children whose lives have been saved by gender-affirming care, physicians from the state’s children’s hospitals, and national experts in trans care. He’s also heard the state’s sharp defense of its law, featuring what is being framed as the “expert” testimony of nationally prominent anti-trans activists who made dubious claims about the efficacy and risks of puberty blockers, hormones, and other gender-affirming medical treatment.

Ohio’s sweeping law, dubbed the “Saving Adolescents from Experimentation” or “SAFE” Act, doesn’t just block the use of puberty blockers and hormones in trans youth (while allowing such medical interventions for cisgender children who may need them for precocious puberty or polycystic ovary syndrome). Passed by a GOP supermajority in January over Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s veto, it also prohibits trans girls and women from playing women’s sports, including college athletics. The ACLU of Ohio is challenging the entire law as a violation of the state’s single-subject rule for legislation, which requires that bills must pertain to one topic. The state says that topic is “addressing gender transition in children,” but the trial mainly focused on what the families of two trans girls have argued is the discriminatory, life-threatening impact of the ban on gender-affirming care.

“She laid down and wept in my bed. She is carrying looming anxiety and deep sadness surrounding this law.”

The International Court of Justice, the body that rules on whether or not a state is committing war crimes, just released a groundbreaking advisory opinion saying Israel’s settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem violate international law. The advisory opinion is not binding, but carries “authority and legal weight,” according to the New York Times.  

Judge Nawaf Salam, reading out the Court’s opinion, said that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem constitutes “de facto annexation,” and that it infringes on the rights of the Palestinian people for self-determination. Therefore, Salam said, Israel should fully end their occupation of those territories outside its 1967 borders, provide reparations to Palestinians harmed by occupation, cease the construction of new settlements, and dismantle settlements that currently exist.  

Of the 15-member court, 11 members agreed on every provision of the opinion. Several members of the court also argued what most human rights organizations have said for decades: that Israel’s policies in the West Bank constitute “racial segregation or apartheid.” 

The United Nations General Assembly had requested the opinion on the legal consequences of Israel’s occupation in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem in January 2023, prior to the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s military incursion into Gaza. This opinion is separate from the ongoing deliberations over South Africa’s case regarding genocide in Gaza. 

On the first night of the Republican National Convention, I settled into a seat in the upper levels of Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum to watch the most incongruous political address of my life. The speaker was Sean O’Brien, the general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The subject was the betrayal of the American worker. The audience included many of the kinds of people he held responsible for that treachery.

O’Brien, whose union has not endorsed Donald Trump, started off nice but soon got angry. He slammed the “economic terrorism” of corporations firing employees who try to organize and attacked business groups like the US Chamber of Commerce. As he worked further into his list of grievances, the applause grew more and more tepid, until it finally just seemed to stop. Trump and his newly announced running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio—whom O’Brien singled out for praise for having recently walked a picket line—stood politely throughout. Occasionally, the former president turned to his would-be vice president, cracked a joke, and smiled.

If you suspended your skepticism for a moment, it looked like a glimpse of the anti-corporate, anti-elite Republican Party that Vance, a self-styled spokesman of “forgotten” people, has promised to usher in. Then I checked my notifications and found the Republican Party that Vance more concretely represents. Around the same time O’Brien took the stage, another figure who has historically shied away from events like the RNC was shaking up the race in his own unprecedented way: The Wall Street Journal reported that one of the world’s richest union-busters, Elon Musk, was planning to donate $45 million a month to a super-PAC supporting the Republican campaign. 

The Republican convention was defined by the basic tension between the image Trump sought to project and the purpose his candidacy ultimately serves. In many ways, some cosmetic and others not, it was a far different event than any Republican convention in memory. The gathering offered a glimpse of a potentially unbeatable electoral coalition this November—a unified MAGA movement that’s making inroads with Black men, Latino voters, Gen Z, and union members. Republicans were expanding the tent by granting admittance to anyone who shared their antipathy to migrants, pronouns, and $5 gas. Vance, a Never Trumper–turned–MAGA heir, was a symbol of that vibe shift, promising an ideological realignment built to last. But his star turn in Milwaukee suggested a different story, one that might sound less like O’Brien and more like Musk. It was not the rise of the workers. It was the restoration of the bosses.

Former president Donald Trump walked out onto the floor at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night with a raised fist and a still-bandaged ear, a reminder of the assassination attempt he survived last week.

As he drew a standing ovation from the nearly 2,500 GOP delegates, a rendition of the hit-song “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World” reverberated through Fiserv Forum arena.

Man thinks about our little bitty baby girls and our baby boys
Man made them happy, ’cause man made them toys
And after man make everything, everything he can
You know that man makes money, to buy from other man
This is a man’s world
But it wouldn’t be nothing, nothing, not one little thing, without a woman or a girl.

It wasn’t just a catchy tune. Throughout four 14-plus hour days reporting at the Republican confab in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the music’s lyrics underscored the prevailing attitude on gender norms among the scores of GOP convention-goers I interviewed, the litany of speeches I tuned into, and the half a dozen issue-focused meetings I attended as a member of the media.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Millions of low-income households are at risk of having their power disconnected this summer, exacerbating the risk of deadly heat as the climate crisis drives up temperatures.

A new report by the Centre for Energy Poverty and Climate (EPC) and the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (Neada) found that almost half of Americans live in states without rules restricting disconnections for unpaid or overdue energy bills during potentially deadly heatwaves, forcing some low-income families to choose between cooling their homes and paying rent.

It comes as large swaths of the midwest and eastern US remain under heat advisories amid sweltering temperatures and humidity caused by a slow-moving area of high pressure, which brought misery across the west and south-west last week.

More than a week after a disastrous debate, President Joe Biden sat down with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News to answer some of the tough questions his performance raised about his ability to run for office. Biden repeated many of the claims his team had already made since last Thursday: he was sick, he was exhausted, and yes, he had a bad night, but it wasn’t an “indication of any serious condition.”

He made clear he would not consider dropping out of the presidential race, with one concession—”if the Lord Almighty comes down” to tell him to.

Whether or not God intervenes, Democrats are beginning to step in. In the week following his debate, four House Democrats called on Biden to step out of the race, and they were joined this morning by Rep. Angie Craig from Minnesota, the first member from a swing state to make the call.

President Joe Biden tried to recover from a disastrous first debate performance and reassure American voters that he’s not too old or cognitively impaired to run the country by sitting down for a primetime interview with ABC’s George Stephenopolous on Friday. Yet it’s his interviews with local radio hosts that are now drawing scrutiny because of the seemingly outsized level of planning on the president’s behalf.

Andrew Lawful-Sanders, host of “The Source” on WURD in Philadelphia, said during an appearance on CNN that Biden’s team gave her a list of eight questions before an interview on Wednesday. “I got several questions—eight of them,” she said. “And the four that were chosen were the ones that I approved.” CNN reporter Victor Blackwell noted that the questions Lawful-Sanders asked were “essentially the same,” as those asked by Earl Ingram during an interview on WMCS in Milwaukee, who also appeared on CNN and did not appear to disagree with Lawful-Sanders’ description of receiving questions.

It’s not unusual to go back and forth with an elected official’s team before an interview, but it’s certainly not a good look that Biden, a president who has spent the better part of five decades in public service, needed what amounts to a level of hand-holding for a local radio interviews. His team , of course, pushed back, saying that it was his campaign, not the White House, that sent the questions, and that the interview wasn’t contingent on the questions that were chosen.

They say history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes—and 2024 is, no matter how inconvenient for an embattled Joe Biden, resonating deeply with 1968. From anti-war protests on campuses to the Democratic National Convention being hosted in Chicago, these two distinct years, though decades apart, are drawing eerie comparisons, as I explain in my new video:

Biden’s disastrous debate performance last Thursday sparked calls for him to drop his reelection bid. While it’s uncertain if Biden will follow Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1968 footsteps and step aside, the fallout has added another dimension to the historical parallels. Team Biden insists the 81-year-old is in it until November. But on Tuesday, Representative Lloyd Doggett of Texas became the first elected Democrat to call for Biden to reconsider, doing so from “the heart of a district once represented by Lyndon Johnson.” Others Democrats have since joined him.

On paper, Johnson and Biden share few similarities. Biden sailed through a relatively uncontested primary, while Johnson faced significant challenges from Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy. Biden, like Johnson, indeed faces a persistent anti-war movement. But 1968 campus protest organizer Juan Gonzalez assured me recently that the two eras, in this regard, are not the same: “I think people need to understand that there were significant differences,” he said. While the US is funding and supporting Israel’s war on Gaza, “back in 1968, the US was directly participating in the Vietnam War, leading to the deaths of over two million Vietnamese.”

Despite insistence from the White House that President Biden has no plans to drop out of the general election after his disastrous debate performance last week, Republicans seem to be already running against Vice President Kamala Harris.

A new ad released on Wednesday by the National Republican Congressional Committee calls Harris Biden’s “enabler in chief” and “architect of the border crisis.” The ad, titled “Careful for what you wish for,” depicts Harris as conniving, as her remarks championing the president play against images of Biden stumbling on stairs and appearing to fall asleep. It ends with a demand—“This November: Vote Republican. Stop Kamala”—as ominous music plays in the background over footage of Democrats chanting “four more years!” at Biden’s State of the Union while Harris smiles and claps in the background.

The Trump War Room account on X, run by the campaign, also posted a four-minute long video featuring various clips of Harris repeating the phrase, “What can be, unburdened by what has been.” The apparent aim of the video was to try to cast the phrase in a conspiratorial light. “Here are four straight minutes of Kamala Harris being ‘unburdened,” the account wrote. Other prominent figures on the right also appeared confident that Harris would soon be replacing Biden. “They’re gonna put in Kamala,” conservative commentator Meghan McCain posted on X. Turning Point CEO Charlie Kirk, meanwhile, breathlessly posted what he claimed was a “scoop” that “leftist [get out the vote] groups…are lining up the switch to Kamala.”

By now, anyone who follows presidential politics has an opinion on what President Joe Biden should do following his debate meltdown that raised questions, concerns, and fears about his mental acuity. So far, a small number of Democrats have urged him to withdraw from the 2024 race. A larger number of pundits have done the same. Major funders are fretting. And the White House and his campaign have insisted Biden is up to the job and can carry on. On social media, his diehard supporters have raged against the commentariat and the apostate Democrats, asserting that Donald Trump, his lies and multiple liabilities, and the threat he poses to American democracy ought to be more the focus than Biden’s age.

No surprise, there’s no consensus in the Democratic world.

After speaking with numerous people within the Democratic cosmos, I have thoughts about this mess and possible steps forward. And I’m immodest enough to believe they might be worth sharing.

Let’s look at this as a decision tree. The first branch: What does Biden’s debate debacle mean? Many of his supporters and his own team have dismissed it as merely one bad night, with some pointing toward President Barack Obama’s disastrous first debate with Mitt Romney. But Obama’s poor performance was due to his lack of preparation and his arrogant decision to not approach Romney as a worthy adversary. It said nothing about his abilities or health.

Biden’s debate prompted the question: Was this an one-off (due to a cold, fatigue from grueling travel, or whatever) or an indication of a worrisome condition that could—or probably would—manifest itself again. If the latter, this meant his reelection bid—and the effort to prevent Trump from returning to the White House—was in great danger. One more public appearance like this one would likely end Biden’s campaign. And if such an event occurred after the convention, the Democrats would be dead ducks. Burdened with a candidate seen as in severe cognitive decline, the party could take a wallop that would include losing the Senate and failing to retake the House. The authoritarian-minded Trump would rule again, with a Republican-controlled Congress.

So here is the first decision. If you’re in the one-bad-night camp and still ridin’ with Biden, your calculating is done. You’re going to have to white-knuckle your way through the next four months.

If you believe the debate revealed a potentially existential threat for the Biden effort, then you move on to other branches on the decision tree. The next question is, if not Biden, whom?

Before proceeding, let’s note that under Democratic rules, there is no way for the party at this point to deny Biden its presidential nomination. He holds a majority of delegates to next month’s convention in Chicago, and they are pledged to vote for him. For anything else to happen, Biden would have to withdraw from the race. If he sticks with it, the rest of this what-iffing is irrelevant.

On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that former President Donald Trump has broad immunity from prosecution for crimes he allegedly committed while in office. The majority decision provoked furious dissent from the court’s three liberal justices. “The President is now a King above the law,” wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor, concluding, “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”

The decision is deeply at odds with public opinion. Surveys by researchers at Bright Line Watch earlier this year found that fewer than 30 percent of Americans— including about half of all Republicans— believed the court should extend broad immunity to Trump and future presidents. The immunity decision joins a string of other, less-publicized opinions this term that will contribute to the paralyzed state of the American government and loosen constraints on public corruption.

Taken as a whole, these opinions may have ripple effects on American democracy that go far beyond the immediate impact on federal regulations or Trump’s criminal trials. At a bare minimum, they suggest that the conservative justices have forgotten a basic first-year law school lesson: when citizens no longer believe they can resolve disputes through trusted institutions or depend on a rational legal system to hold officials accountable, they are much more inclined to take matters into their own hands. And unlike many Supreme Court oral arguments, this one isn’t just a hypothetical.

“What we have found is that support for political violence is highly correlated with deep distrust of democratic institutions.”

In many ways, the end of Roe v Wade didn’t happen when the US Supreme Court issued its decision to overrule Roe in the Dobbs case in June 2022. Rather, it came nine months earlier, on September 1, 2021, when the Texas Heartbeat Act, also known as SB8, took effect. The law banned abortion after embryonic cardiac activity became detectable, around six weeks of pregnancy, with no exceptions for fetal abnormalities. The job of enforcement was outsourced to private citizens (also known as “bounty hunters”), thereby making the law much harder to challenge in court. Since then, as wave after wave of post-Dobbs abortion restrictions have been enacted in deep-red states, reproductive rights advocates and journalists have—rightly—focused their attention on the effects of those draconian laws on the health and autonomy of women.

The reports of harm to pregnant patients, however, though wrenching, have been anecdotal, which has limited their ability to move the most conservative hearts and minds. Then there is an additional factor: It’s not clear that many far-right lawmakers and courts actually care about the well-being of women.

But they do claim to care about babies, which is why a new study about SB8 and infant mortality is so important. A team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University has spent the two-and-a-half years since SB8 took effect crunching data on infant deaths in Texas and other states, then re-crunching it to confirm their results. They found that as women whose access to abortion was drastically curtailed by SB8 began to give birth in 2022, those infants were dying at much higher rates compared both to the period before the law took effect and to other states that didn’t have near-bans. 

The likeliest reason, according to Alison Gemmill, a lead author on the study, is that more women were forced to carry what are sometimes called “medically futile” pregnancies to term. These are pregnancies in which the fetus had catastrophic genetic and other anomalies incompatible with life outside the womb. Unsurprisingly, many of those newborns quickly died. The study’s measured academic language— “Restrictive abortion policies may have important unintended consequences in terms of trauma to families and medical cost”—barely hints at the depth of suffering imposed by SB8. 

Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) on Tuesday became the first Democrat in office to call for President Biden to drop out of the general election in the wake of his disastrous debate performance last week.

In a lengthy statement, Doggett said Biden “should make the painful and difficult decision to withdraw” in order to reduce the likelihood of a second Trump term.

“Instead of reassuring voters [at the debate],” Doggett said, “the President failed to effectively defend his many accomplishments and expose Trump’s lies.”

“Our overriding consideration must be who has the best hope of saving our democracy from an authoritarian takeover by a criminal and his gang,” he continued. “Too much is at stake to risk a Trump victory—too great a risk to assume that what could not be turned around in a year, what was not turned around in the debate, can be turned around now. President Biden saved democracy by delivering us from Trump in 2020. He must not deliver us to Trump in 2024.”

Last December, UNICEF reported that two and a half months into Israel’s offensive in Gaza, at least a thousand children lost one or both of their legs. As more Palestinians become disabled, their risks expand. A United Nations committee warned in May of “the disproportionate impacts on people with disabilities due to the destruction of hospitals, the cut-off of essential services, restrictions, [and] non-existing access to humanitarian assistance” amid the war waged in response to Hamas’s attack on October 7th.

One organization that is trying to help disabled Palestinians in Gaza is Humanity & Inclusion, an international Nobel Peace Prize-winning humanitarian group, which has operated in Palestine—both in Gaza and the West Bank—for nearly three decades. Since October, H&I has provided mobility devices to newly disabled Palestinians.

Their work has been treacherous—multiple H&I staff members have been killed and their office in Gaza City has been destroyed. In mid-June, H&I says the Israeli Defense Forces bulldozed their warehouse in Rafah, where medical supplies and mattresses had previously been stored. (In response to a request for comment on the destruction of H&I’s warehouse, a spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces did not deny the warehouse’s destruction, but said the IDF “follows international law.”) The Israeli army has also prohibited many medical devices from entering Gaza, claiming that these are “dual-use items”—that crutches or hearing aid batteries, for example, could have a military use. 

Mother Jones spoke to Noor Bimbashi, an advocacy officer for Humanity & Inclusion based in the West Bank about the challenges that disabled people in Gaza face, the impact of aid restrictions, and how those in the West Bank experience violence, too. 

On Skidaway Island, off the coast of Georgia, “not one blade of grass feels out of place.” Giant oak trees provide shade from the heat. Nature surrounds you, but as Center for Public Integrity reporter Alexia Fernández Campbell describes, it “seems to have been tamed to become amenities” for The Landings, a gated community that takes up half of the island.

The average price of a home in The Landings was more than $800,000 in 2022. The community boasts a spa, four clubhouses, five swimming pools, and six golf courses. Although Black people are the majority in nearby Savannah, on Skidaway Island 93 percent of the population is white.

It’s hard to tell now, but this wealthy white enclave used to be home to a Black utopia. In 1865, a promise was made to newly freed people, the promise of “40 acres and a mule.” For thousands, that was made real. The Center for Public Integrity found that at least 99 men and women were issued federal documents entitling them to land on the island. But as the latest episode of Reveal details, it was later all taken back from them as white Southerners sought pardons from President Andrew Johnson, who granted many of them and returned plantations back to the enslavers.

“You could feel chills to know that they had it and then they just pulled the rug from under them, so to speak,” said Linda Brown, one of the few Black residents at The Landings.

This weekend marks the official start of summer, and it’s shaping up to be a scorcher. The extreme heat that’s afflicted much of the eastern United States this week is set to continue, with temperatures hitting the mid to upper 90s in the Midwest and the Mid Atlantic regions. The National Weather Service reports that temperatures in the Midwest are “anomalous and dangerous for early Summer.” In the Southeast, temperatures could exceed 110 degrees. Making matters worse, overnight temps are expected to stay high, allowing little relief to those without access to air conditioning.

According to climate scientists at World Weather Attribution, we’ve largely done this to ourselves. Their recent report found that in the year 2000, this level of heat was only expected to occur once in a lifetime for those living in North and Central America. Now, “on average a person will experience it 5 or 6 times in their lifetime.” That uptick is driven by “fossil fuel driven warming,” which has made the heatwaves we’re experiencing in this region 35 times more likely to occur.

Black people in the US are 40 percent more likely than other racial groups to live in areas “with the highest projected increases in extreme temperature related deaths.”

“As long as humans fill the atmosphere with fossil fuel emissions, the heat will only get worse,” stated one of the report’s authors, Izidine Pinto, a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, adding that “vulnerable people will continue to die.”

In 2022, in a decision penned by Justice Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court announced a new approach to regulating firearms. Henceforth, the court declared in Bruen, gun laws would only pass Second Amendment muster if they are “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Within a year, the Supreme Court was asked to confront the effect of their backward-looking decision: Could someone subject to a domestic violence restraining order have firearms? The question pitted the right of abusers to possess guns against the right of their victims not to be murdered. Would the justices double-down on their history-only approach, or would it find a way to keep guns away from violent abusers?

This decision hinges on ancient laws most people have never heard of.

On Friday, all the justices—except Thomas—decided that the government could take guns away from people whom a court deems a credible threat. The decision in United States v. Rahimi attempted to make Bruen workable in our modern world: one with far deadlier weapons than in 1791, and far more respect for women. But as the decision in Rahimi, its concurrences, and its lone dissent demonstrate, a clear and sensible approach to evaluating gun laws is a long way off.