On September 10, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump will debate each other for the first time. Amid weeks of contention over the debate’s rules, it has been reported that ABC News, the host network, informed both candidates’ camps that their microphones will be muted when the other is speaking. While Trump’s campaign has agreed to the terms, Harris’ camp reportedly has not.

Both Harris and Trump (though not his team, as my colleague Julianne McShane has written) want to have unmuted mics. But ABC’s rules are not unprecedented—Trump and President Biden’s debate this summer also featured muted mics.

Harris and her team’s argument for unmuted mics seems to rely on letting Trump embarrass himself: Speaking over a debate opponent when it is the other person’s turn to talk does not exactly look professional. But there is a more serious reason for Harris to reconsider her stance: ensuring that one person talks at a time will make the event more accessible to some disabled viewers.

For people who need live captioning during the debate, constant changes in speakers are challenging to follow. In the UK, the BBC uses different colors to indicate different speakers when multiple people are talking—but US news networks have yet to catch up. It is also considered best practice for American Sign Language interpretation to only let one person speak at a time, which makes interpreters’ jobs more practical.

Near midnight last week, Democratic delegates with the Uncommitted movement sat in protest outside Chicago’s United Center. Elected by hundreds of thousands of primary voters who oppose President Joe Biden’s response to the war in Gaza, the delegates were sent to the DNC “uncommitted”—not pledged to support any candidate at the convention. Earlier in the week, the group did what they were elected to do by calling for a permanent ceasefire and immediate arms embargo. They also continued a simpler request they’d started making before the convention: a spot for a speaker on the main stage to talk about Palestine.

On Wednesday evening, the DNC and Harris campaign finally told them that no Palestinian American would be allowed to speak from the main stage of the convention. Here was their last ditch effort. They hoped a sit-in—and the Civil Rights history it evoked—would push party leaders to change their minds.

As the delegates waited, I watched a middle-aged man walk past. He shouted at the protesters: “Free the hostages!”

“We agree,” a chorus of Uncommitted supporters replied.

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

Earlier this year, the e-commerce corporation Amazon secured approval to open two new data centers in Santiago, Chile. The $400 million venture is the company’s first foray into locating its data facilities, which guzzle massive amounts of electricity and water in order to power cloud computing services and online programs, in Latin America—and in one of the most water-stressed countries in the world, where residents have protested against the industry’s expansion.

This week, the tech giant made a separate but related announcement. It plans to invest in water conservation along the Maipo River, which is the primary source of water for the Santiago region. Amazon will partner with a water technology startup to help farmers along the river install drip irrigation systems on 165 acres of farmland. The plan is poised to conserve enough water to supply around 300 homes per year, and it’s part of Amazon’s campaign to make its cloud computing operations “water positive” by 2030, meaning the company’s web services division will conserve or replenish more water than it uses up.

The reasoning behind this water initiative is clear: Data centers require large amounts of water to cool their servers, and Amazon plans to spend $100 billion to build more of them over the next decade as part of a big bet on its Amazon Web Services cloud-computing platform. Other tech companies such as Microsoft and Meta, which are also investing in data centers to sustain the artificial-intelligence boom, have made similar water pledges amid a growing controversy about the sector’s thirst for water and power.

Taiwanna Anderson’s life changed forever in December 2021, when she found her 10-year-old daughter Nylah unconscious, hanging from a purse strap in a bedroom closet.

Barely an adolescent, Nylah wasn’t suicidal. She had merely come across the “Blackout Challenge” in a feed of videos curated her for her by TikTok’s algorithm. The challenge circulating on the video-sharing app encouraged users to choke themselves with household items until they blacked out. When they regained consciousness, they were supposed to then upload their video results for others to replicate. After several days in a hospital’s intensive care unit, Nylah succumbed to her strangulation injuries. Anderson sued TikTok over product liability and negligence that she alleges led to Nylah’s death.

For years, when claimants tried to sue various internet platforms for harms experienced online, the platforms benefited from what amounted to a get-out-of-jail-free card: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 statute that offers apps and websites broad immunity from liability for content posted to their sites by third-party users. In 2022, a federal district judge accepted TikTok’s Section 230 defense to dismiss a lawsuit filed by Anderson based on the assessment that TikTok didn’t create the blackout challenge video Nylah saw—a third-party user of TikTok did.

“TikTok reads 230 of the Communications Decency Act to permit casual indifference to the death of a ten-year-old girl.”

Nevada State Sen. Robin Titus—at the time a member of its state House—received an email from a speech pathologist in rural Nevada. The pathologist and his students had noticed that the state constitution used the phrase “deaf and dumb” to describe people who were deaf or hard of hearing. 

“He said, ‘Hey, this is just wrong. We shouldn’t be using this terminology anymore,’” Titus, the Nevada Senate’s Republican minority leader, told me. Where people with disabilities are concerned, Sen. Titus says official language should not put “some negative connotation on what their needs are,” as such terms do. 

Now that the bill has passed Nevada’s House and Senate unanimously in two consecutive sessions—a prerequisite to place an amendment on the state ballot—Nevada voters will decide whether to remove the words “insane,” “feeble-minded” and “dumb” in describing, for example, programs that help disabled people find employment, replacing them with more modern terms. 

“This ballot measure is also creating public awareness of disability issues and the value of people with disabilities.”

On Wednesday, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) weighed in on the Trump team’s tussle with an employee at Arlington National Cemetery during a wreath-laying ceremony on Monday honoring falling American soldiers. And by “weighed in,” we mean lied and told the vice president to “go to hell.”

At a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Vance told a crowd that he didn’t think there was actually anything notable about what had transpired: “The altercation at Arlington Cemetery is the media creating a story where I really don’t think that there is one,” he said, adding, “a lot of [those families] were there with [former President Trump], they invited him to be there and to support them.”

“It is amazing to me that you have, apparently somebody at Arlington Cemetery, some staff member, had a little disagreement with somebody, and the media has turned this into a national news story,” Vance continued.

The Ohio senator went further, telling Harris that she could “go to hell” for criticizing Trump’s visit to the cemetery. The choice words came despite Harris having never publicly commented on the incident, contrary to Vance’s claim that Harris “wants to yell at Donald Trump because he showed up” at Arlington. When asked for comment, Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign, claimed that Vance had been referring to Harris’ campaign team—not the VP herself.

Two Trump campaign staffers reportedly got in a fight with an official at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday during a wreath-laying ceremony to honor soldiers who died in the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan. (NPR first reported the incident on Tuesday.)

The cause? Trump’s staff allegedly wanted to ensure he’d be photographed honoring the troops, even though federal law “prohibits political campaign or election-related activities,” including photographers, at the cemetery, according to an Arlington National Cemetery spokesperson.

Nonetheless, Trump’s team did manage to turn the event into an opportunity for content, producing and posting a video to their TikTok account, set to somber music, that suggests the soldiers’ deaths were President Joe Biden’s fault. As of Wednesday afternoon, it had more than 6.6 million views. (The video was also posted on Trump’s Instagram page, which posted other footage from the event, too; Trump’s senior advisor Dan Scavino also shared videos on his X page.)

Less than a month ago, President Joe Biden was still the Democratic nominee and Donald Trump and his allies all but assumed they would easily carry the 2024 presidential election in November. But since Biden’s historic decision to step out of the race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris, the dynamics of the race have dramatically changed. Democrats seem reenergized and Trump and his campaign now have reasons to worry. And recent polling numbers show why. 

According to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, Harris entering the race has shaken up the political map and made crucial Sun Belt states competitive again. In Arizona, for example, Harris is now leading Trump 50 to 45 percent. She also has a narrow advantage in North Carolina, a state Trump carried in 2020. The GOP nominee is still heading in Georgia and Nevada, but the two candidates are essentially tied across an average of those four Sun Belt states. An earlier Times/Siena poll also showed Harris edging Trump in the battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

“A dead heat is a big deal today,” Nate Cohn, the Times‘ chief political analyst writes. “It represents a huge shift from earlier in the cycle, when Mr. Trump’s relative strength over Mr. Biden among young, Black and Hispanic voters had propelled him to a surprising lead across these relatively young and diverse states.” It also spells bad news for Trump, he argues, “who may need to take all three of Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona to win in November.”

On Friday, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released an update that one would think would please Republicans decrying a Joe Biden-made “border crisis.” The number of migrant encounters at the US-Mexico border in July was the lowest in almost four years. Last month, CBP apprehended 56,408 migrants along the border, a 32 percent decline in comparison to June and the lowest since September 2020. It marked the fifth consecutive monthly drop, according to CBS News.

The decrease in migrant crossings follows the implementation of a border crackdown policy by the Biden administration. In June, the White House announced a sweeping executive order, based on an authority previously invoked by the Trump administration, allowing border officials to temporarily suspend some asylum processing and swiftly return certain migrants to neighboring Mexico and their countries of origin at times when crossings reach a certain threshold. 

Since June, the CBP announcement states, the agency has removed or returned more than 92,000 people to 130 countries, including via at least 300 deportation flights. “July’s total numbers between ports of entry are also lower than July 2019,” the agency says, “and lower than the monthly average for all of 2019, the last comparable year prior to the pandemic.” Increased enforcement by the Mexican government also explains the lower numbers.

But these record-breaking statistics have not deterred Republicans from advancing their narrative of a “Biden border crisis” or trying to blame Vice President Kamala Harris for it. In response to the newly released CBP numbers, Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, issued a statement saying, “the unprecedented border crisis the president and his ‘border czar’ have created continues to rage on.” As I previously explained here, Harris, now the Democratic nominee, was never appointed “Border Czar” or put in charge of managing migration:

On Thursday, the Biden administration announced that it had negotiated down the cost of the 10 most costly drugs covered by Medicare in a landmark deal. Once the reduced prices are enacted, in 2026, patients are expected to spend billions less out of pocket—as is the US government.

Meanwhile, Kamala Harris is speaking in North Carolina and elsewhere to push a new slate of economic policies, including aggressive action on price gouging, medical expenses, and the rising cost of living. What are the natural next steps for Democrats to build on the momentum of the White House’s Medicare deal?

They’ve got a lot of options. Even among generic drugs, prescriptions cost around three times as much in the US as they do in other countries. Americans across political parties also agree that the federal government negotiating drug costs down is a good thing, according to KFF and other polls.

There are at least four paths the government can take to keep cutting prescription drug costs that are likely to meet with similar public support—so people don’t have to forgo prescriptions they need.

On Thursday, the Biden administration announced that—after months of negotiations—it had finally struck a deal with prescription drug companies to slash the prices of some of Medicare’s most expensive medications, prescriptions for which currently cost the federal government some $56 billion last year.

“It’s a relief for the millions of seniors that take these drugs to treat everything from heart failure, blood clots, diabetes, arthritis, Crohn’s disease, and more—and it’s a relief for American taxpayers,” President Biden said in a statement. 

“Kamala and I both get it. We know it isn’t just about health care,” he added, appearing alongside Vice President Kamala Harris for their first joint event since she gained the Democratic presidential nomination. “It’s about your dignity.”

Starting in 2026, ten prescriptions for ailments ranging from diabetes to blood cancer will have their costs drastically lowered—by up to 79 percent of their manufacturers’ list price. These cuts will save taxpayers $6 billion and seniors and beneficiaries alone more than $1.5 billion, according to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

It has been a little over three weeks since President Joe Biden stepped down from his campaign for reelection. Since then, the Israeli military has killed at least 1,017 people in Gaza, according to Palestinian health authorities, tipping the death toll over 40,000; Israel has bombed multiple schools, claiming the buildings were used as centers for Hamas fighters—in one strike, 93 Gazans were killed with American-made bombs; and the United States has approved another sale of weapons to Israel, this time for $20 billion.

The US backing of Israel’s war on Gaza has largely faded from the headlines, eclipsed by the drama surrounding a new candidate in the upcoming presidential election. But as Vice President Kamala Harris heads into the Democratic National Convention, the war has far from halted. And there is not much hope for a cessation in fighting to come soon.

As her campaign emerges, Harris will have to speak directly about a conflict that is still at the center of the world. Hundreds of thousands voted against nominating Biden, with 30 Uncommitted delegates headed to the DNC to call for an arms embargo, among other policies.

Ceasefire talks—scheduled for Thursday and pushed by the US, Qatar, and Egypt— look unlikely to succeed, in part because Ismail Haniyeh, a Hamas negotiator, was assassinated in Iran on July 31, in an action widely thought to have been carried out by Israel (though no government has claimed responsibility). Hamas leaders have stated that they will not participate in this week’s round of talks. 

Anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign hosted an online panel Wednesday on the future of AI moderated, for some reason, by Ian Carroll, a self-styled journalist with a history of antisemitic statements.

In the course of the conversation, Kennedy admitted that he “gets manipulated by AI all the time.”

“Somebody will send me something and I’ll go ‘Holy cow, did you see this?’,” he said, describing how he credulously forwards fake content to his children, only for them to have to correct him. (Kennedy said that, unlike him, his children can identify fake images “immediately.”)  

RFK Jr. said he regularly “gets manipulated by AI.”

It was about this time last week when I first saw that ad for Gemini, Google’s new artificial-intelligence chatbot. If you’ve been watching much of the Paris Olympics, you know the one I’m thinking of. The spot, called “Dear Sydney,” features a father whose daughter idolizes the American hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. His daughter “wants to show Sydney some love,” and while he describes himself as “pretty good with words,” the dad adds, “This has to be just right.”

“Gemini, help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is,” he types, “and be sure to mention that my daughter plans on breaking her world record one day.”

I have never seen an ad that made me so thoroughly depressed about the product it was selling, and I watch Trump ads for my job. Why would you get a robot to write a fan letter from your daughter? What other meaningful personal interactions are we supposed to want to swap out with a multimodal large language model?

And apparently I’m not alone. For days I kept seeing people bring up the ad. It “takes a little chunk out of my soul every time I see it,” New York magazine contributing editor Will Leitch wrote, in one representative take. On Friday, Hollywood Reporter offered some good news: Google was taking the spot off the airwaves. We did it, Joe.

The news got a bit buried, with so much going on in national politics, but Tuesday was a bad night for Republicans who have stood up to election-deniers in their party.

In Maricopa County, the largest and swingiest county in America’s largest swing state, Republican primary voters ousted Stephen Richer, an incumbent who had made a national name for himself by standing up to Trump allies such as Kari Lake over the last three years. The man who defeated Richer, state Rep. Justin Heap, never outright disputed the legitimacy of previous elections, but his supporters sure have—he was recruited to run by a now-indicted fake elector, touted the endorsement of two congressmen who pushed for the state’s 2020 election results to be rejected, and was backed by Lake, who falsely accused the incumbent of adding “300,000 illegal ballots” to the tally in her 2022 run for governor. Republican voters also ousted a member of the board of supervisors (which is responsible for election day voting and ballot tabulation) who had, like his colleagues, drawn the ire of the Trump orbit for doing his job.

It was not just Richer or Maricopa, though. In Yuma County, on the border with Mexico and California, another Republican election official, Richard Colwell, is on the verge of losing his race to a conservative activist named David Lara who has spread conspiracies about elections. Per Bolts’ Alex Burness:

Lara has often lied about elections in Arizona, saying election fraud has taken place for “many years, wide open.” He has also floated punishing that fraud with the death penalty. His complaints helped inspire parts of the debunked film “2,000 Mules,” which is popular on the right for alleging the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. The New York Times reported in 2022 that the movie drew from a purported investigation that Lara conducted alongside another county resident into election tampering.

Early on the morning of July 31, a group of about 70 people arrived at the anodyne office of the cargo company Atlas Air, in White Plains, New York. 

They were members of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ)—an activist group that focuses on equity issues in New York City—there to stage a fake “press conference” to highlight the Department of Defense’s contracts with Atlas Air.

A man in a gray pinstripe suit played the CEO of the company, which is the single largest operator of 747 freighter jets in the world. “Atlas Air is so proud to do its part to support the US military,” the actor enthused. “I am especially proud that, through our DoD contracts, Atlas Air has made multiple deliveries to Israel in the last 10 months.” He added with gusto: “As the bombs keep raining on Gaza, the dividends keep raining on our shareholders!” 

Those behind him, dressed as pilots complete with sewn-on epaulets, cheered as he held up a graph with a line going up—“more bombs equals higher profits!”

It began with Tim Walz on Morning Joe. 

Auditioning for the Democratic nod for vice president, the Minnesota governor steamed through complaints about the Republican politics of the present. Sen. JD Vance, Walz said, “gets it all wrong” when he talks about small-town values. “It’s not about hate. It’s not about collapsing in. The golden rule [in rural America] is mind your own damn business.”

Walz argued Republican policies had destroyed Vance’s imagined idyllic America; conservatives had pushed division through book bans and an isolated world wrought by trickle-down economics. “We do not like what has happened,” Walz said, seeming to speak for an unmentioned mass of people, “where we can’t even go to Thanksgiving dinner with our uncle because you end in some weird fight that is unnecessary.” 

The host laughed.

Fred Trump III, Donald Trump’s nephew, very much hopes for a bipartisan national effort to better support the needs of disabled people, a passion driven by being the father of a disabled son. That’s why he tried—when his uncle was president of the United States—to use his family ties to push for disability rights.

Fred did manage to have a White House meeting with disability advocates that his uncle Donald attended. Later on, he was met with comments by Donald that Fred “should just let” his son, Donald Trump’s grandnephew, “die”—an anecdote he recounts in a new book, All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way.

The former president, Fred Trump says, has never met his grandnephew William. In fact, he’s never even tried to. Donald isn’t the only Trump family member to share that attitude, according to Fred—who, perhaps unsurprisingly, doesn’t think “anything positive happened” for disability rights under Trump’s administration.

When JD Vance appeared as a special guest at the 2021 summer conference of the Napa Institute, a Catholic organization that seeks to “advance the re-evangelization of the United States,” he was weathering a storm for a talk he had given that week to a conservative group in which he assailed the Democratic Party for being led by childless people. He had also proposed that parents be granted more of a say at the ballot box than people without kids. During that speech, he had called out Vice President Kamala Harris, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Cory Booker, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for being non-parents. (Harris was a parent to two stepchildren, and Buttigieg adopted twins the following month.) Asked at the Napa Institute event about these remarks, Vance did not blanche. He doubled down and even singled out AOC for promoting what he called a “sociopathic” view of the family.

Vance, then a Republican candidate for Senate in Ohio, told the crowd of Catholic activists that he had gotten into “trouble” for his earlier comments. But he stood by his remarks, saying “My basic view is that if the Republican Party, the conservative movement stands for anything… the number one thing we should be is pro-babies and pro-families.”

He emphasized that not enough Americans were procreating: “We have, I believe, a civilizational crisis in this country, where we have unhealthy families, we have families falling apart. We have the rise of childhood trauma. And even among healthy intact families, they’re not having enough kids, such that we’re going to have a longterm future in this country.”

After being wrongfully detained by Russian security forces for more than a year on bogus espionage charges, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has been released following a massive prisoner swap, the Journal confirmed on Thursday.

The swap—which also reportedly includes two dozen prisoners total from six countries, including former US Marine Paul Whelan and Russian-American Radio Free Europe editor Alsu Kurmasheva—comes as a major win for the Biden administration and advocates of press freedoms. The WSJ in particular kept Gershkovich’s wrongful detention front and center in the media throughout his detention, reminding the world that journalism is not a crime. Among those efforts were the hashtag #IStandWithEvan and a front page dedicated to Gershkovich on the first anniversary of his detention. The page was largely blank with the headline, “His story should be here.”

In a statement, President Biden called the exchange “a feat of diplomacy,” adding, “Some of these women and men have been unjustly held for years. All have endured unimaginable suffering and uncertainty. Today, their agony is over.”

Gershkovich’s family, and the families of some the other American hostages, joined Biden at the White House on Thursday afternoon to celebrate the news. “This is a very good afternoon,” Biden told reporters. He added that he and the families who joined him in person had just spoken to the newly-released Americans by phone from the Oval Office. “I told them, ‘welcome almost home,'” Biden said.