First Thing: Kamala Harris introduces VP pick Tim Walz at raucous rally

Minnesota governor thanked Harris for ‘bringing back the joy’. Plus: end-of-life patients find solace with psychedelics

Good morning.

One of the wildest periods in US political life is over. Joe Biden has abandoned his re-election bid and endorsed the presidential campaign of his vice-president, Kamala Harris. Yesterday morning, hours after securing the Democratic nomination, Harris announced Tim Walz as her running mate, a little-known Minnesota governor who is aformer social studies teacher, high school football coach and national guard veteran.

At a raucous rally in Philadelphia last night, Harris – the first woman of color to lead a major party ticket – introduced Walz as “the kind of vice-president America deserves” as they cast their campaign as a “fight for the future”. Walz thanked Harris for “bringing back the joy” and looked ahead towards the campaign in store, as a number of recent polls showed the VP moving ahead of Donald Trump in the race for the White House. “We’ve got 91 days,” he declared. “My God, that’s easy. We’ll sleep when we’re dead.”

“He’s the kind of person who makes people feel like they belong and then inspires them to dream big,” Harris said of Walz. “That’s the kind of vice-president he will be. And that’s the kind of president America deserves.”

• Where does he stand on reproductive freedom? Walz drew a personal connection to one of the most searing issues of the election cycle, saying he and his wife had two children through in vitro fertilization (IVF) after years of struggling with infertility. “When we welcomed our daughter into the world, we named her Hope,” he said.

• A ‘history-making’ event. The Guardian spoke to hopeful attenders at the rally, as well as Cherelle Parker, Philadelphia’s mayor, who told the crowd: “Don’t let Trump the trickster take our eyes off the prize.”

Cori Bush loses primary after pro-Israel groups spend millions to oust ‘Squad’ member

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) has claimed its second big win in the Democratic primaries after a prominent member of the progressive “Squad” in Congress, Cori Bush, lost her primary in St Louis after pro-Israel pressure groups spent millions of dollars to unseat her over criticisms of Israel’s war on Gaza. Aipac, in June, played a leading role in unseating the New York congressman Jamaal Bowman, another progressive Democrat who criticised the scale of Palestinian civilians deaths in Gaza.

In Missouri, Aipac pumped $8.5m into the race for the state’s first congressional district to support the St Louis prosecutor Wesley Bell through its campaign funding arm, the United Democracy Project (UDP). Bush had angered some pro-Israel groups, being one of the first members of Congress to call for a ceasefire after the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel. Bush then described Israel’s large scale killing of civilians as “collective punishment against Palestinians” and a war crime.

Judge rules against Black high school teen in hair discrimination case

Barbers Hill school district near Houston, Texas, says its policy restricting hair length for male students instills discipline while teaching grooming and respect for authority. Yesterday, a federal judge ruled in the school’s favor after 18-year-old Darryl George was kept out of his regular high school classes for most of the 2023-24 school year because the school district said his hair length violated its dress code.

But in his order, US district judge Jeffrey Brown questioned whether the school district’s rule caused more harm than good. “Not everything that is undesirable, annoying, or even harmful amounts to a violation of the law, much less a constitutional problem,” Brown wrote.

In other news …

• The state of Georgia allowed local election boards to withhold the certification of a vote in the face of unspecified “discrepancies” – a Republican-led move pushed by the very people who tried to withhold the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the state in 2020

• Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus will head Bangladesh’s interim government after the former prime minister SheikhHasina fled the country amid a mass uprising that left hundreds of people dead and pushed the South Asian nation to the brink of chaos.

• A Pakistani man with alleged ties to Iran has been charged over a foiled conspiracy to carry out political assassinations on US soil, the justice department said yesterday, as it disclosed what officials say is the latest murder-for-hire plot to target US public figures.

• Moscow has said about 300 soldiers from Ukraine launched a cross-border attack into a hitherto quiet part of the front yesterday, with reports of fighting at a town as deep as six miles inside Russia. Moscow said its forces had repelled the incursion.

Stat of the day: Airbnb shares drop 12% as company flags weakening US demand

The vacation rental company Airbnb forecast third-quarter revenue below Wall Street estimates yesterday and reported a lower second-quarter profit, as it flagged weakening demand from US customers. Shares of the company were down about 12% after the bell. Domestic travel in the US has been under pressure since the start of the year as more Americans grow cautious about travel spending amid growing economic uncertainty.

Don’t miss this: Should we all try ‘sex before coffee’?

Just two countries have museums dedicated to penises. Iceland is one of them, just one of the more explicit symbols of an un-prurient approach towards sex in the Scandinavian country known for its permissive culture around sex. ‘Sex before coffee” is the go-to cliche of Scandinavian romantic habits, but in each country it means something different. Only in Iceland, however, is it meant literally: any romantic permutation will start with sex rather than a date.

… or this: Why the word Taiwan is banned at the Olympics

Angelina Yang thought she knew the Olympic rules – no national flags, no political messages. She was excited to support her compatriot athletes at the Olympics Games in France, where she was living and studying. So the Taiwanese student made what she thought was an uncontroversial sign – the outline of her home island, with the words “jiayou Taiwan” (Go Taiwan) written in Chinese.

But as she unfurled the sign in the stadium stands to watch her team play China in badminton, she was quickly surrounded. “I was still holding my poster and the security kept talking to his co-worker with his walkie-talkie. After that there was a man, we [think] he’s a Chinese man, he stood in front of me to block the poster.” The man then ripped it from her hands. “I was really surprised. And I was really sad and angry at the same time,” Yang said. “We’re not doing anything wrong. Why would we be treated like this?”

Climate check: In Alaska, advocates say reducing the prison population is a key climate strategy

In 1969, Alaska officials chose to build a prison on flat land formed from glacial deposits that were deemed “poor … material” for the building’s foundation. Then, one day in August 2022 after heavy rainfall, the land underneath the Lemon Creek correctional center buckled under the pressure, causing sections of the prison’s foundation to sink into the ground.

For environmental advocates in Alaska, a construction project to repair the prison is deeply misguided. “We have to stop incarcerating so many people because it’s an unmanageable amount of people for the infrastructure, for staffing and for Alaska,” said Megan Edge, the director of the ACLU of Alaska’s Prison Project. With the escalating climate crisis, the upkeep of carceral infrastructure will probably only grow more challenging.

Last Thing: The end-of-life patients finding solace in magic mushrooms

In 2020, Thomas Hartle had his first psilocybin session. He felt himself disappear: an experience as close to death as one can have while still being alive, he said. After it was over, instead of being afraid of the inevitable outcome of his stage four colon cancer illness, he felt relief. “It gave me a taste of what life after life could be like,” he said. “Instead of the idea that the lights shut off, the party’s over, it was like a transition from one state to another. That was really comforting to me.”

Larger studies are under way to see if psilocybin could be a tool regularly used for palliative care, to ease the dying process. But researchers are still asking: how exactly does psilocybin help people confront their demise? Does it have to do with the sense that came to Hartle – that there is something that comes after life?

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