The Daily 202: With poetry, the Democratic convention spotlights Biden’s decency

On Thursday night, standing in an austere ballroom with just a few journalists, aides and Secret Service agents, Biden accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination for president of the United States. The house where he would repeat those poems over and over again was just a few miles away, but he had traveled incalculable distances to arrive onstage in the Chase Center. Naturally, he concluded with a poem. 

Biden’s speech was well received, but maybe the most memorable moment from the fourth and final night of the party’s convention was a prerecorded video by 13-year-old Brayden Harrington.

On Feb. 4, Biden met him on the rope line after a campaign rally in Concord, N.H. The former vice president had just finished fourth in the Iowa caucuses and, a week later, would finish in fifth place, with 8 percent, in the New Hampshire primary. Biden’s third bid for the presidency was on life support, and few Americans were paying close attention to the mysterious new coronavirus that had locked down Wuhan, China. 

When Brayden grew emotional as he explained that he has a stutter, Biden invited him backstage that day to talk more. He told him about reading poetry in the mirror and mentioned a book of poems by W.B. Yeats that he had found particularly helpful. On Thursday night, holding up a copy of the speech he was reading from his own bedroom, Brayden said Biden also showed him how he marks up his addresses to make them easier to read aloud. 

“Without Joe Biden, I wouldn’t be talking to you today,” he said, fighting to produce several words but keeping his composure. “I’m just a regular kid. … Joe Biden cared.”

Joe Biden cares. That was the central message of the final night of the convention. Democrats hope voters see Biden’s empathy as a central contrast in his challenge against President Trump.

Former New York governor Mario Cuomo (D) said you campaign in poetry and govern in prose. This unconventional convention was all about poetry. There was far more emphasis on personality than policy. Organizers focused less on tossing red meat to the liberal base than featuring character references to show voters that their standard-bearer is a decent man who has integrity, heart and empathy.

Biden never uttered Trump’s name as he described a “perfect storm” of four crises facing the country: a pandemic, recession, systemic racism and climate change. Speaking about young people agitating for government to do more about climate change, racial injustice and gun violence, Biden said: “I hear their voices and if you listen, you can hear them, too.”

In February 2018, after a mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla., Trump held a listening session at the White House with victims of gun violence. An aide had jotted down this talking point on a note card that the president held in his hands during the 70-minute event: “I hear you.”

Without mentioning that episode, Biden made clear in his acceptance speech that, if he is elected, staffers won’t need to remind him. “My Dad was an honorable, decent man,” Biden said. “He used to say, ‘Joey, I don’t expect the government to solve my problems, but I expect it to understand them.’”

He argued that character, compassion and decency – not just his name – will be on the ballot in November. “The current president has cloaked America in darkness for much too long. Too much anger. Too much fear. Too much division,” Biden declared. “Here and now, I give you my word: If you entrust me with the presidency, I will draw on the best of us, not the worst. I will be an ally of the light, not the darkness.”

If former president Barack Obama’s speech on Wednesday night was a warning that democracy itself is in danger, Biden’s closing speech was about reassuring Americans that perseverance is possible and recovery is in reach. Biden noted that Franklin Roosevelt, who was president when he was born, faced another virus – polio – and endured. “And we will, too,” he said.

Biden didn’t just overcome his stutter. He was sworn into the Senate shortly after his first wife and daughter died in 1972, and he faced another crushing loss when his son, Beau, died of brain cancer in 2015 at 46. He has been tempered and defined by loss. His life serves as a testament to resiliency.

“In Joe Biden, you have a human being who is empathetic, who is honest [and] who is decent,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). “At this particular moment in American history, my God, that is something that this country absolutely needs.”

Sanders made that comment during a pre-taped discussion with other former Biden rivals from the primaries. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) recounted how Biden once called her cellphone to compliment her as she walked off the Senate floor late one night after delivering a speech to an empty chamber. Former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg (D) remembered how Biden pulled him aside before an Iowa steak fry to tell him that someone working on his campaign had experienced some family trauma.

Another video clip that played near the start of the two-hour program, about the influence of Biden’s Catholicism, showed the candidate quoting Soren Kierkegaard, as he often does on the stump. “Faith sees best in the dark,” the Danish philosopher said.

Biden said Obama, his former running mate, was the kind of president people “could and did look up to” as a role model. “No one’s going to say that about the current occupant of the White House,” Biden said. “If he’s given four more years, he’ll be what he’s been for the last four years. … He’ll wake up every day believing the job is all about him, never about you.” Then the challenger asked a rhetorical question: “Is that the America you want for you, your children, your family?” 

This 25-minute speech was the shortest acceptance speech in modern times. Partly, this was because there was no audience to applaud or cheer. Partly, it was because he did not beat around the bush.

Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, and their spouses went outside the arena afterward. They watched a fireworks show in lieu of the traditional balloon drop. Supporters, who had parked like they had come for a drive-in movie, honked approval from their cars.

Biden closed on an optimistic note, with one of his favorite passages from the Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s “The Cure at Troy”:

“History says, Don’t hope

On this side of the grave,

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

And hope and history rhyme.”

Heaney adapted this in 1991 from the Sophocles play, “Philoctetes,” which is about the end of the Trojan War. It was intended to say something about the Troubles in Northern Ireland that he had lived through. The stanza that immediately follows the line Biden quoted is this: 

“So hope for a great sea-change 

On the far side of revenge. 

Believe that further shore 

A series of in-depth editorials will lay out the harm that the board believes the incumbent president has caused and the destruction they fear he could cause if he secures a second term. The first installment of the series, called “Our democracy in peril,” will get a big splash in Sunday’s newspaper as a preview of next week’s Republican convention. Read it here first:

“Trump will make this argument to the American people: Things were great until China loosed the novel coronavirus on the world. If you reelect me, I will make things great again. … But beyond the low unemployment rate he gained and lost, history will record Mr. Trump’s presidency as a march of wanton, uninterrupted, tragic destruction. America’s standing in the world, loyalty to allies, commitment to democratic values, constitutional checks and balances, faith in reason and science, concern for Earth’s health, respect for public service, belief in civility and honest debate, beacon to refugees in need, aspirations to equality and diversity and basic decency — Mr. Trump torched them all. … The capitulation of the Republican Party has been nauseating. Misbehavior that many people vowed never to accept as normal has become routine. A second term might injure the experiment beyond recovery.”

“Biden goes to church so regularly that he doesn’t even need tear gas,” said actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus, emceeing the convention, a reference to Trump’s Bible photo op in Lafayette Square.

Bannon was taken into custody off the coast of Westbrook, Conn., while aboard a 150-foot yacht called the Lady May owned by Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, who was once close with that country’s intelligence service but is now wanted by Beijing authorities on charges of fraud, blackmail and bribery. A judge allowed the former Breitbart News chairman to be released on $5 million bond, secured by $1.75 million in assets. With the indictment of Bannon, prosecutors have now brought criminal charges against more than half a dozen people who worked for Trump’s campaign or his administration or advised him personally. Those who have been convicted or pleaded guilty to federal crimes include Trump’s former campaign chairman, his deputy campaign chairman, his former personal attorney and his former national security adviser. 

“In a 23-page indictment, prosecutors said Bannon and another organizer, Air Force veteran Brian Kolfage, lied when they claimed they would not take any compensation as part of the campaign, called ‘We Build the Wall.’ Bannon, prosecutors alleged, received more than $1 million through a nonprofit entity he controlled, sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to Kolfage while keeping a ‘substantial portion’ for himself,” Matt Zapotosky, Josh Dawsey, Rosalind Helderman and Shayna Jacobs report. “Bannon emerged from the federal courthouse in Manhattan, taking off his mask and smiling at a bank of television cameras. ‘This entire fiasco is to stop people who want to build the wall,’ he said. … Trump said he felt ‘very badly’ but asserted of Bannon, ‘I haven’t been dealing with him for a very long period of time.’ Trump said he felt the private fundraising effort was ‘something I very much thought was inappropriate to be doing.’ ‘I don’t like that project,’ the president said. ‘I thought it was being done for showboating reasons.’ …

“Those involved in the project had close ties to the administration, and campaign memorabilia was often pictured on the privately built section of the border wall. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. was a guest at a symposium hosted by the We Build the Wall group in New Mexico in 2019, praising the organization as ‘private enterprise at its finest.’ ‘Doing it better, faster, cheaper than anything else,’ he added, in comments the group highlighted on its website. … One of the group’s advisers, Kris Kobach, is the former Kansas secretary of state known for his … close ties to the Trump administration. In January 2019, Kobach told the New York Times that he had described the organization to President Trump in a personal phone call and that he had given it his blessing. … Other advisers included Erik Prince, a conservative activist and defense contractor close to Bannon, as well as former congressman Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) and former Major League Baseball star Curt Schilling.”

Attorney General Bill Barr knew about the investigation and was briefed about the arrest in advance: “The case was investigated by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and charged in court by the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan. Two months ago, Barr had moved to oust Geoffrey Berman as the U.S. attorney there and replace him on an acting basis with Craig Carpenito, the U.S. attorney in New Jersey. The Bannon investigation was ongoing at that time, as was a probe involving Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney. Berman initially refused to step down, forcing Trump to fire him and promote Berman’s deputy, Audrey Strauss, to replace him on an interim basis. The shake-up alarmed congressional Democrats, who accused Barr of maneuvering to quash investigations with consequences for the president’s personal interests. Berman later told the House Judiciary Committee that the appointment of Carpenito or another outsider ‘would have been unprecedented, unnecessary and unexplained and would have resulted in the delay and disruption of the office’s investigations.’”

In a cosmic twist, Bannon was arrested by the Postal Service police. “When a Coast Guard vessel sped toward a yacht that had Bannon aboard Thursday morning, it carried the gun-toting members of the Postal Service’s investigator unit,” Alex Horton reports. “Many learned from news reports that their friendly neighborhood mail carrier is backed by a centuries-old investigative arm that handles cases of child exploitation, cybercrime, drug trafficking and financial crimes. … The U.S. Postal Inspection Service traces its roots further back than the United States itself. William Goddard was named the nation’s first surveyor in 1775, a role created under Postmaster General Benjamin Franklin to audit postal accounts and investigate theft of mail or postal funds … That would make the USPIS the country’s first and oldest federal law enforcement agency.”

“The plans under consideration, described by four people familiar with Postal Service discussions, would come after the election and touch on all corners of the agency’s work. They include raising package rates, particularly when delivering the last mile on behalf of big retailers; setting higher prices for service in Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico; curbing discounts for nonprofits; requiring election ballots to use first-class postage; and leasing space in Postal Service facilities to other government agencies and companies,” Jacob Bogage, Lisa Rein and Josh Dawsey report. DeJoy is set to testify today before the Senate and on Monday before the House. While it is possible he will change the particulars of any plans under discussion after the election, he has made clear he intends to overhaul the service. “DeJoy has told associates he was brought in to stem the Postal Service’s losses and that drastic changes were needed to make the agency solvent. He is determined to stay the course and make wholesale changes after the election, according to an associate who spoke with him recently.”

• A senior official at USPS headquarters directed managers not to reconnect mail sorting machines. USPS officials also warned employees not to speak to the media. (Vice)
• Trump’s reelection effort has officially spent more than $1 billion, a record-breaking sum at this point in a campaign. (Michelle Ye Hee Lee and Anu Narayanswamy)
• Trump said he plans to use the law enforcement apparatus to monitor the election. “We’re going to have everything,” he told Sean Hannity on Fox News during the Democratic convention. “We’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re going to have law enforcement, and we’re going to hopefully have U.S. attorneys and we’re going to have everybody, and attorneys general.” (Philip Bump)
• A disinformation campaign intended to stoke fear among African Americans about mail voting, boosted by the Trump-aligned group FreedomWorks, is misleadingly using LeBron James’s image and taking a quote from him out of context. The tax-exempt nonprofit group has extensively promoted a website behind the operation. (Isaac Stanley-Becker)
• At least 83 percent of American voters can cast ballots by mail this fall. Thirty-four states and D.C. already allowed anyone to vote absentee. But many of these places are making the process easier. (Kate Rabinowitz and Brittany Renee Mayes) 

Shortly after U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero threw out Trump’s lawsuit attempting to block a subpoena by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., who is seeking eight years of the president’s financial records from his accounting firm, Trump’s legal team filed an emergency motion asking the judge for a delay in enforcing the subpoena so Trump may appeal, Shayna Jacobs and David Fahrenthold report. Trump’s team also asked a federal appeals court and the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene and stay the judge’s ruling. Asked about the ruling, Trump predicted the case would eventually end up back at the Supreme Court. 

• The president echoed a key part of Stormy Daniels’s account of her alleged extramarital affair with him. Trump said he’s “not a big fan of sharks,” adding he wouldn’t donate to shark-saving organizations. While describing a visit to Trump’s Beverly Hills bungalow, Daniels said in 2011 Trump is “terrified of sharks” and would talk about how he would “never donate to any charity that helps sharks.” (Philip Bump)
• The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to restore Trump’s ability to block Twitter users from following him. (WSJ) 

In Old Forge, Pa., Trump accused his challenger of having “abandoned” Pennsylvania – even though Biden was only 10 when his family moved to Delaware so his father could get a job, Seung Min Kim and Felicia Sonmez report. “‘He left,’ Trump said of Biden. ‘He abandoned Pennsylvania. He abandoned Scranton. He was here for a short period of time, and he didn’t even know it.’ … Biden has frequently visited Pennsylvania, and his 2020 campaign is headquartered in Philadelphia. During his time in the Senate, he was sometimes jokingly referred to as ‘Pennsylvania’s third senator’ due to his roots in the state and the fact that large swaths of Delaware could be considered a suburb of Philadelphia. …  

“Trump also cast Democrats as the party of ‘mobs and criminals.’ ‘If you want a vision of your life under [a] Biden presidency, think of the smoldering ruins in Minneapolis, the violent anarchy of Portland, the bloodstained sidewalks of Chicago, and imagine the mayhem coming to your town and every single town in America,’ Trump told the crowd.” Reminder: Trump is president. These things are happening on his watch.

Pennsylvania was Trump’s narrowest win in 2016. Democrats are feeling hopeful about Biden’s chances. Local Democrats in the area Trump spoke at say they see evidence Luzerne County, which voted for Obama twice before electing Trump, could be swinging back in their favor as Biden courts the White working-class voters who defected four years ago. “And the convention that ended Thursday night with Biden paying tribute to his Northeastern Pennsylvania roots, they say, is likely to have helped their cause,” Griff Witte reports. Kathy Bozinski, the Democratic Party chair in Luzerne, said she’s been “absolutely overwhelmed by requests” for Biden yard signs. “At this point in the 2016 campaign, there was not even a fraction of the enthusiasm that we’re experiencing now.”

The House speaker abandoned her longtime ally a few days after he lodged attacks on Kennedy and his iconic family dynasty, Paul Kane reports: “Pelosi cited Kennedy’s hard work in campaigning for many of the Democrats who won in 2018, flipping the majority and returning her to the job of speaker, but she also cited her own family’s close ties to the Kennedys, including her father’s role running the Maryland campaign for John F. Kennedy’s presidential bid in 1960. … Pelosi said that Markey’s campaign had crossed a hallowed line by running a negative campaign against the Kennedy dynasty. … Pelosi, 80, signaled that it was time for a new crop of leaders who would represent ‘this party’s future,’ a shot at Markey, 74, who has been in Congress for 44 years. … 

“Markey has formed an alliance with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) over climate legislation that they called the Green New Deal. … Ocasio-Cortez, who has broken ranks with Pelosi to endorse primary challengers this year to incumbent Democrats, lashed out on Twitter over the speaker’s decision to buck an incumbent in a Senate race. ‘No one gets to complain about primary challenges again,’ she tweeted, noting that Pelosi supported cutting off financial ties to firms that worked against House Democratic incumbents in primaries.”

“The new policy stunned many health experts and laboratories because of its timing, several months into a pandemic. Some public health experts warned the shift could result in unreliable coronavirus tests on the market, potentially worsening the testing crisis that has dogged the United States if more people get erroneous results. They argued the change is unlikely to solve current testing problems, which at this point are largely due to shortages of supplies such as swabs and chemical reagents. But supporters cheered the change as long overdue, saying it could help get new and more innovative tests to market more quickly. They said that the FDA review process sharply slowed testing at the beginning of the pandemic and that the new policy could ensure such bottlenecks don’t recur,” Laurie McGinley and Yasmeen Abutaleb report. 

“The change in policy came as a surprise to many at the FDA and was a point of intense disagreement between HHS Secretary Alex Azar and FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn. Tensions have been rising between the two men for weeks, according to several people familiar with the situation … Hahn vociferously opposed the change … The episode is the latest in which health agencies have been undercut by political overseers. On Wednesday, for example, President Trump blamed the FDA for not yet authorizing the emergency use of convalescent plasma, a promising but unproven treatment. ‘You have lot of people over there that don’t want to rush things. They want to do it after November 3rd,’ he said in a White House press briefing. …

“HHS officials also said they were unaware that the FDA began requiring emergency use authorizations, a kind of temporary approval, for laboratory-developed tests in February, after Azar declared a public health emergency. FDA supporters said the agency has followed the same practice during previous public health emergencies, including the H1N1 pandemic in 2009 and the Zika outbreak in 2015 and 2016. They stressed that it is critical during health emergencies to make sure tests are accurate and not fraudulent. 

“Some FDA backers inside and outside government worry the policy change may be a way to blame the agency for the February testing debacle that set the United States behind and allowed the virus to spread undetected for weeks. In February, the administration was relying almost entirely on a test developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — which is standard practice during public health crises — but the test was faulty. It took three weeks for the FDA to loosen restrictions that allowed other tests — at that time, mostly laboratory-developed tests — to come to market. Azar was head of the coronavirus task force at the time. The move, FDA backers say, may be an effort to allow Azar to argue he took action, albeit belatedly, to improve testing. There’s also concern within the administration, some current and former officials say, about possible congressional investigations similar to the 9/11 commission that would probe what went wrong with testing and why the administration was not better prepared. No one wants to be blamed, the officials said.”

• Eleven of Trump’s most senior officials, including Azar, voted during a 2018 White House meeting to separate migrant children from their parents under the leadership of Stephen Miller. Others who voted to take kids away from their parents include former attorney general Jeff Sessions, former Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and secretary of state Mike Pompeo. No one in the meeting made the case that separating families and putting kids in cages would be inhuman or immoral, NBC News reports.
• Tony Fauci is recovering from vocal cord surgery. In a text message, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said doctors told him to avoid speaking “for a few days” and then limit the time he spends doing interviews and other speaking for a week or two. (Lenny Bernstein)
• CDC Director Robert Redfield expressed optimism the South has begun to “turn the tide” against the virus. But he’s concerned about the situation elsewhere in the country: “Middle America is stuck right now. The Nebraskas, the Oklahomas, we need to see those numbers [come down].” (JAMA)
• Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) tested positive for the virus. Cassidy, a physician and powerful member of the Senate health committee, said he plans to quarantine for 14 days. (CNN) 

A new study published in the Journal of Pediatrics “found that some children have high levels of virus in their airways during the first three days of infection despite having mild symptoms or none at all — suggesting their role in community spread may be larger than previously believed,” Ariana Eunjung Cha reports. “One of the study’s authors, Alessio Fasano, a physician at MassGeneral Hospital for Children, said that because children tend to exhibit few if any symptoms, they were largely ignored in the early part of the outbreak and not tested. But they may have been acting as silent spreaders all along.” 

Flu vaccine manufacturers have boosted production by about 15 percent, to record levels, with nearly 200 million doses for the United States. To expand access to the flu shot, federal health officials have issued a directive allowing pharmacists in all 50 states to give childhood vaccinations, including flu shots. The move was praised by some advocacy groups but drew sharp criticism from the American Academy of Pediatrics, which called the announcement “incredibly misguided.” (Lena Sun)

The World Health Organization said coronavirus cases are “steadily increasing” each week in Europe, a worrisome resurgence believed to be driven by infections among younger people. In all, Europe had reported nearly 2 million coronavirus cases — less than half the number in the United States – but the death toll in Europe exceeds that of the United States, with more than 180,000 fatalities compared with at least 170,000 here. (Jennifer Hassan, Kim Bellware and Joshua Partlow)

“North Carolina State University will switch all of its undergraduate classes online after clusters of coronavirus cases were found on campus this week, adding to the chaos of students scrambling to find new housing as more colleges shut down,” Susan Svrluga reports. “At the nearby University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which had already announced an abrupt shift to virtual learning earlier this week, the chancellor said undergraduate classes would be canceled Monday and Tuesday to allow students time to move off campus as the number of cases continued to rise.”

South Dakota health officials say a person who participated in the motorcycle rally this month and visited One-Eyed Jack’s, a Main Street bar, for about five hours has tested positive for the coronavirus and could have transmitted the virus to others at the time, Hannah Knowles reports. Four days after the event, they are aware of fewer than 25 infections among people who attended in the 14 days before illness set in. But they also acknowledged they don’t know the extent of the exposures and cannot track them down. The event’s true impact may be impossible to track, said Benjamin Aaker, president of the South Dakota State Medical Association. For every case that’s identified, he said, there are probably many more officials will never hear about because they’ll be counted in the totals of other states.

• Utah public school students and staffers can be charged with a misdemeanor for failing to wear a mask. The policy was originally instituted by Gov. Gary Herbert (R) in July, but it began drawing scrutiny over the last week as kids returned to class. The theoretical punishments have enraged some parents opposed to requiring masks. (Salt Lake Tribune)
• Yale psychology professor Laurie Santos warned students they should be prepared for their classmates to die as they return to campus. She told students they should consider that their behavior has “life-or-death consequences.” (Paulina Firozi)
• Hawaii authorized “resort bubbles” for quarantining visitors. Guests would be fitted with bracelets tracking their movements, setting an alarm if they leave their hotel. (Antonia Farzan)
• Several hospital workers and their union filed a lawsuit against HCA Healthcare and Riverside Community Hospital, the nation’s largest health-care chain, alleging the company and one of its Southern California hospitals failed to protect employees, patients and the community from the virus. (Amy Goldstein) 
• Robert O’Neill, the former Navy SEAL who claims to have killed Osama bin Laden, said Delta banned him from flying because he removed his mask on a flight. (Farzan) 
• D.C. is close to ending the HIV epidemic, but covid-19 may get in the way. The pandemic is making it harder to reach people in need of HIV treatments, forcing the District to change strategies. (Fenit Nirappil) 
• The coronavirus caseload fell again in the D.C. region. The seven-day average number of new infections in D.C., Maryland and Virginia fell to 1,531, a number last recorded in mid-July. Maryland reported Thursday each of its 24 jurisdictions notched a seven-day test positivity rate below 5 percent for the first time. (Dana Hedgpeth and Justin Moyer)
• New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said she’s “very proud” of her country’s handling of the virus after Trump claimed the island was experiencing a “big surge.” “The United States has 16,563 cases per million people. We have 269 cases per million people,” she said. (Jennifer Hassan)

• The wildfires in California more than doubled in size and force, degrading air quality, forcing tens of thousands of people to evacuate and killing at least five. Californians are being urged to prepare a bag filled with a change of clothes and necessities and be ready to evacuate their homes on a moment’s notice. Evacuees have to make difficult decisions about where to go. While in the past they might have been able to stay with friends or family, now they must weigh the risk of exposure to the coronavirus. (Heather Kelly, Andrew Freedman and Jason Samenow)
• Satellite imagery from the fires shows thick plumes of smoke streaming off each blaze have combined into a thick, smoky veil covering parts of at least 10 states, causing air quality to plummet. (Matthew Cappucci)
• Two tropical depressions are marching across the Atlantic and forecast to soon become tropical storms Laura and Marco, according to the National Hurricane Center. Tropical storm watches have been posted for Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. (Cappucci)
• Doctors in Siberia refused to transfer Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny to Germany, causing his supporters to believe that authorities are trying to cover up a suspected poisoning by stalling “until the poison in his body can no longer be traced.” Navalny has been in a coma since falling ill during a flight on Thursday. (Isabelle Khurshudyan)
• The leader of the coup against Mali’s president was trained by the U.S. military, officers from both countries said. (Danielle Paquette)
• The Trump administration will tap into more than $300 million in frozen Venezuelan government funds to revive efforts to oust President Nicolás Maduro. (Karen DeYoung and Anthony Faiola)
• A group of influential Republicans – including Don Jr., Fox News host Tucker Carlson and some Trump donors – are pushing to block plans to build the Pebble Mine, a controversial gold and copper mine in Alaska. The project was on the verge of winning a key permit from the Trump administration despite concerns from environmentalists it could significantly damage Alaska’s salmon fishery in Bristol Bay, which happens to be a favorite fishing spot of the president’s son. (Juliet Eilperin, Ashley Parker and Steven Mufson)
• The Kansas City Chiefs banned fans from wearing headdresses and Native American-themed face paint to home games at Arrowhead Stadium. (Mark Maske) 
• Pittsburgh police clashed with protesters outside the home of Mayor Bill Peduto (D) for a second consecutive night in an encounter ending with tear gas being deployed. The protest followed the arrest of 25-year-old protester Matthew Cartier, who is facing charges for disorderly conduct and obstruction of highways. (Jessica Woflrom and Mark Berman)
• Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D) defended the use of police to disperse protesters assembled outside her home, saying she’s received threats and needed to protect her loved ones and neighbors. Police have effectively banned protesters from her block. Some neighbors have criticized the heavy police presence in the area. (Chicago Tribune)
• American Airlines will cut service to 15 cities once the federal ban against service cuts expires. The carriers agreed to that restriction as part of a multibillion-dollar bailout. The change means 10 airports will soon lose their only airline service. The Pitt-Greenville Airport Authority in North Carolina said American called him Wednesday night to share news. The other airports losing American flights are Del Rio, Tex.; Dubuque and Sioux City, Iowa; Florence, S.C.; Huntington, W.Va.; Joplin, Mo.; Kalamazoo/Battle Creek, Mich.; Lake Charles, La.; New Haven, Conn.; New Windsor, N.Y.; Roswell, N.M.; Springfield, Ill.; Stillwater, Okla.; and Williamsport, Pa. (Ian Duncan)

A few of the 2020 candidates were not included in the Democratic convention:

The Bannon indictment combines so many storylines, including Trump boat parades, the USPS and the border wall:

The former communications director for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) connected the dots:

Stephen Colbert dissected Biden’s speech: 

Seth Meyers had fun with Bannon’s arrest: