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Great morning. Steve Bannon was arrested on fraud costs. The postmaster common is set to testify these days. And on the last evening of the D.N.C., Joe Biden formally accepted his party’s nomination for president.
Final evening, the Democratic Nationwide Convention capped off 4 days of remote speeches, video montages and roll-phone votes with a last deal with from the party’s presidential nominee, Joe Biden.
“America’s historical past tells us that it has been in our darkest moments that we’ve produced our biggest progress,” Biden explained, in a speech that mixed a somber evaluation of the state of the nation with hopeful appeals to its values. “And in this dark minute, I feel we are poised to make terrific progress yet again.”
What did the convention inform us about the Democrats’ message for November? Our colleague Lisa Lerer, who writes the On Politics newsletter, advised 4 significant takeaways.
one. Character and the coronavirus. The convention pitched Biden’s Washington practical experience and story of personalized tragedy as a match for a minute of nationwide crisis.
“Viewers received a pretty fantastic sense of Biden himself as a loved ones guy, somebody with a moral compass,” Lisa advised us. And each Biden and his working mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California, sharply criticized President Trump’s response to the pandemic.
two. Large stakes. “This convention was waged in existential terms,” Lisa explained. Maybe the starkest warning came from former President Barack Obama, who cast his successor as a risk to American democracy.
three. A significant tent. From disaffected Republicans to progressive Democrats, the convention showcased the breadth of the coalition the get together hopes to mobilize. But squabbles in excess of speaking occasions, generational gaps and divergent ideologies also laid bare the difficulties of holding this kind of a broad coalition collectively.
“On the 1st evening, for illustration, voters heard from John Kasich, a Republican, and Senator Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist,” Lisa explained. “Those two males most likely agree on pretty tiny past the want to defeat Trump.”
four. Winning is a single factor, governing a different. Notable speakers like Senator Elizabeth Warren and former President Bill Clinton touted elements of Biden’s policy agenda, as did Biden himself. But the convention targeted far more on critiquing Trump’s stance on issues like gun violence, climate transform and the virus than on detailing Democrats’ answers.
Provided Biden’s existing lead, Lisa mentioned, that may well be ample. “But I do believe voters like to know what they are receiving with a candidate,” she explained. “What will this man or woman do past just ousting the man in workplace appropriate now? I’m not positive this convention answered that query.”
Trump and the G.O.P. will get a shot at a rejoinder when their personal largely virtual convention commences Monday.
For far more on the D.N.C.’s fourth evening:
4 Extra Large STORIES
one. Steve Bannon arrested on fraud costs
Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, was charged with defrauding donors to an on line fund-raising energy to create a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Prosecutors explained Bannon had siphoned virtually $one million from the venture to pay out off personalized costs.
Bannon was arrested early Thursday by federal postal inspectors and particular agents from the U.S. attorney’s workplace in Manhattan, who discovered him off the coast of Connecticut, on a 150-foot yacht owned by a fugitive Chinese billionaire.
Background: The fund-raising venture, known as We Construct the Wall, brought in far more than $25 million. But it failed to complete significantly with the cash, and Trump ultimately disavowed it. 3 many others have been also arrested.
two. A warning from a former postal official
David C. Williams, a former member of the U.S. Postal Service’s board of governors who resigned in protest in April, advised lawmakers that the Trump administration appeared to want to powerful-arm the company into getting to be a “political instrument.”
“If this is the starting of what the president promised, it is the finish of the Postal Services,” Williams explained of current policy alterations that incorporated raising costs and cutting back vital solutions.
Currently: Postmaster Basic Louis DeJoy is scheduled to testify ahead of the Senate this morning. He is most likely to encounter difficult issues about the cuts and about his possibly conflicting enterprise interests.
three. As colleges reopen, a lot of lack nurses
In central Washington State, Janna Benzel is accountable for her total college district — monitoring one,800 college students for coronavirus signs when classrooms open this month, on prime of her standard duties. “I’ll have to go to these colleges and assess each and every sniffle and sneeze that could possibly be a optimistic situation,” she advised The Occasions. “I just do not know if I can do it alone.”
Signal up for our Colleges Briefing to get the most recent on how educators and mother and father are managing the return to college.
four. Kremlin critic’s suspected poisoning
A Russian hospital is refusing to make it possible for the prominent Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny to be transferred abroad for remedy following a suspected poisoning, the opposition leader’s spokeswoman explained these days, setting up a likely standoff as a plane from Germany arrived to fly him out of the nation.
Navalny was rushed to the hospital yesterday following he appeared to endure agonizing ache on a domestic flight following consuming a cup of tea at an airport in Siberia. A health practitioner explained these days that absolutely nothing had been discovered to help the concept that Navalny was poisoned.
This is not Navalny’s 1st brush with health care emergencies: In 2017, an assailant threw a green chemical liquid in his encounter, creating extreme eye burns. Final yr, though in jail for top an unauthorized protest, he had to be hospitalized for a mysterious “severe allergic response.”
Some context: Poison has been the favored weapon of Russia’s protection services for in excess of a century.
Here’s what else is occurring
Strategy OF THE DAY: Backyard your worries away
The pandemic has been a boon to house gardening. The psychological and bodily gains of the action are effectively regarded: longer lives, reduce ranges of depression and publicity to vitamin D. “Gardening decreases tension,” Huma Yasin has written in The Occasions.
Get in touch with with nature can also supply philosophical comfort, The New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead argues: “Many people today, when faced with their personal mortality or that of their loved ones, turn out to be far more attuned to the purely natural planet. This is proof not just of a garden’s electrical power to distract and inspire but of its electrical power to console.”
And for some marginalized communities, gardening grants company in excess of foods insecurity and a lack of nutritious solutions. “Possibilities, answers, freedom — that is what I’m expanding,” a Los Angeles gardener and activist advised The Wall Street Journal. “That’s what the gardens signify.”
Perform, View, Consume, CUBE
Make some dip
Cowboy caviar (also regarded as Texas caviar) lies someplace concerning a dip and a salad. You can customize the recipe with corn, avocados or no matter what else you have on hand. Serve with tortilla chips and appreciate.
The translator behind ‘My Brilliant Friend’
If you have ever go through the wildly well-liked “Neapolitan Novels” series in English, you have come across the translation do the job of Ann Goldstein. Although she’s worked with Elena Ferrante because 2004, even she has by no means met the famously secretive Italian novelist they talk by means of Ferrante’s publisher.
Goldstein, who employed to lead The New Yorker’s copy desk, grew to become a single of the most acclaimed literary translators in the planet by means of her do the job on the series. The pair collaborated yet again on Ferrante’s most recent novel, “The Lying Daily life of Grownups,” out upcoming month.
Go through about her fascinating existence in a new profile.
View one thing … mesmerizing
Our weekly suggestion from Gilbert Cruz, The Times’s Culture editor:
I have by no means solved a Rubik’s Cube and almost certainly by no means will. Numerous of you may well be the exact same. But there is one thing fascinating about that colorful square. So compact! So hard!
A new Netflix documentary presents a peek into the planet of aggressive cubing, wherever mainly youthful people today collect to fix the puzzles as swiftly as feasible. (We’re speaking seconds right here.) “The Velocity Cubers” focuses exclusively on the sweet friendship concerning two of the prime cubers in the planet — the Australian star Feliks Zemdegs and the American Max Park, an autistic teenager whose mother and father 1st place a cube in his hand as a signifies of expanding his fine motor competencies.
Soundtracked by the continual clicky-clack sounds of people today fiddling with the cubes, this forty-minute movie is a reminder that what may well look compact and niche to you can be the complete planet to many others.