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.

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.