Friday Briefing

U.S. ELECTION 2024

The presidential election is less than 70 days away. This is what we’re watching.

Kamala Harris spoke to CNN

In her first interview since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris embraced the economic record of the Biden administration as “good work,” walking a fine line between praising White House investments in domestic manufacturing, clean energy and infrastructure without saying Americans are economically secure. Read our analysis.

Asked what she would do on Day 1 of her presidency, Harris did not lay out any specific plans, speaking generally of promoting an “opportunity economy” that strengthens the middle class but not spelling out executive orders or other immediate actions. She was also pressed on her abandonment of more liberal positions, including banning fracking.

Harris also suggested she would appoint a Republican to her cabinet, a symbolic move that suggests she would seek to govern in a bipartisan manner. She did not indicate who she might have in mind.

It was the second straight day of an Israeli incursion into the northern West Bank, focused in and around the cities of Tulkarm and Jenin, involving columns of armored vehicles, fleets of drones and hundreds of troops. The raids are Israel’s biggest military actions in the West Bank in more than a year.

In other news: Israel will temporarily pause military operations across Gaza in a staggered three-day schedule beginning Sunday to allow health workers to give polio vaccinations to about 640,000 children under the age of 10, U.N. officials said. A W.H.O. representative said that it was “critical” that 90 percent of Gaza’s children be immunized “to stop the outbreak.”

For more: Read about the U.S.’s efforts to contain disaster in the Middle East.

Congo is struggling to confront mpox

Health officials in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the epicenter of the mpox outbreak, said they lack even the most basic tools necessary to contain the virus. The country is struggling to diagnose cases and is still waiting for vaccines, which are trapped in a byzantine drug regulatory process at the W.H.O.

The virus has killed nearly 600 people in Africa and left many more with painful lesions that make it difficult to walk, eat or even breathe.

On the ground: Read our reporter’s dispatch from a remote hospital overwhelmed with patients.

Go deeper: How does the virus spread? And who is most at risk? Here’s what we know.

MORE TOP NEWS

In the eight years since the Brexit referendum, Britain’s Conservative Party cycled through no fewer than five prime ministers, in a spectacle of corruption, hubris, folly and misrule.

Two months after a historic electoral defeat, the party is still a house divided. Facing years in the political wilderness, and a looming leadership contest, Conservatives have scattered into angry camps as they argue over what caused their collapse and what can be done to pick up the pieces.

Lives lived: Betty Jean Hall, a fiery lawyer from eastern Kentucky who successfully fought coal companies for their refusal to hire women, has died at 78.

CONVERSATION STARTERS

ARTS AND IDEAS

Asian men are scoring stronger, sexier roles onscreen

Western pop culture has historically limited Asian American men to stereotypical, even emasculating roles. But writers, directors and actors like Manny Jacinto, above, have pushed for more nuanced representation, resulting in a wave of Asian hunks and heroes who get the girl (or the guy) and save the day. Read more here.

My colleague Matt Stevens, who wrote the article linked above, talked to Times Insider about how it came together.

“I spoke to almost two dozen Asian Americans: mostly actors, writers and directors, but also scholars, historians and everyday people,” he said. “I needed to understand how laws and immigration policy — and especially pop culture — had shaped America’s view of Asian men. And I was interested in how the years of unflattering Hollywood portrayals made Asian and Asian American men feel.”