President Biden took to the stage on the first night of the Democratic National Convention Monday, where he “passed the torch” to Vice President Kamala Harris.

President Joe Biden: “Selecting Kamala was the very first decision I made before I became — when I became our nominee. And it was the best decision I made my whole career.”

A few minutes into Biden’s remarks, protesters dropped a sign that read “Stop Arming Israel.” The sign was quickly wrestled away from the protesters. We’ll speak to three activists involved in last night’s actions in hour two of our live DNC broadcast. The DNC on Monday evening voted to adopt the party’s official platform, which does not call for an arms embargo on Israel and reasserts unwavering U.S. support for Israel.

Among other high-profile speakers Monday night was New York Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “We have a chance to elect a president who is for the middle class because she is from the middle class. She understands the urgency of rent checks and groceries and prescriptions. She is as committed to our reproductive and civil rights as she is to taking on corporate greed. And she is working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing hostages home.”

AOC’s speech came after her fellow Squad members, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, recently lost their House seats after AIPAC poured tens of millions of dollars into their primary challengers’ campaigns.

Also on the first night of the DNC, three speakers — Amanda Zurawski, Kaitlyn Joshua and Hadley Duvall — shared their experiences with abortion, a central issue in November’s election. Zurawski was one of a group of women who sued Texas last year after they were denied abortions, even as their pregnancies posed serious risks to their health and were nonviable. Kaitlyn Joshua described her experience living through Louisiana’s abortion ban.

Kaitlyn Joshua: “Two years ago, my husband and I were expecting our second child. Our daughter Lauryn couldn’t wait to be a big sister. I was getting ready for her fourth birthday party, when something didn’t feel right. Two emergency rooms sent me away. Because of Louisiana’s abortion ban, no one would confirm that I was miscarrying. I was in pain, bleeding so much my husband feared for my life. No woman should experience what I endured, but too many have. They write to me saying, 'What happened to you happened to me.' Sometimes they’re miscarrying, scared to tell anyone, even their doctors. Our daughters deserve better. America deserves better.”

Thousands of protesters took to the streets Monday as part of the “March on the DNC.” Nick Tilsen is an Oglala Lakota leader and president of the NDN Collective.

Nick Tilsen: “I’m here to remind America that this election is happening on the stolen lands of Indigenous people. And the Land Back movement stands in solidarity with a free Palestine and to end all military aid to the state of Israel and to stop the genocide.”

Amid heavy police presence, a group of protesters broke off from the main march and headed to the United Center, where they breached a security fence as they chanted “Whose streets? Our streets!” before police began to make arrests. We’ll hear more voices from the March on the DNC later in the broadcast.
During a separate action Monday, Cheri Honkala with the Poor People’s Army was also arrested near the United Center after she crossed a police line as she attempted to walk into the DNC to deliver a citizen’s arrest warrant for Democratic leaders the Poor People’s Army has accused of crimes against humanity. This is Honkala speaking before her arrest.

Cheri Honkala: “Either arrest me or let me continue to walk.

Police officer 1: “OK. OK. Continue push against us, and you will.”

Cheri Honkala: “Am I under arrest? If I’m not, I will continue to walk.”

Police officer 2: “Make sure you get that on camera, too.”

Police officer 3: “You’re not going that way.”

Cheri Honkala: “You do not have a right to beat or hurt me. I’m asking you.”

Honkala led a similar action in Milwaukee last month, the site of the Republican National Convention, where she was also arrested. Several members of the Poor People’s Army walked from Milwaukee to Chicago ahead of the DNC.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accepted a U.S. proposal that would bridge remaining differences in achieving a Gaza ceasefire, and urged Hamas to do the same. Hamas called out the hypocrisy of Blinken’s announcement and repeated its demand that any deal must result in a permanent end to Israel’s war on Gaza, and accused the U.S. of “merely buying time for Israel to continue its genocide” by watering down a previous agreement. Despite the news from Blinken, who is now in Egypt to garner support for the deal, Israel’s carnage in Gaza continues unabated. The U.N. warned Monday Israel is now “relentlessly” striking the besieged territory, with almost all Gazans displaced and some resorting to living among the rubble amid Israel’s barrage of evacuation orders.

In Khan Younis, distraught family members gathered at the Nasser Hospital morgue after Israeli strikes earlier today killed at least 11 people, including children. This is researcher and professor Iyad Abu Mustafa, speaking outside the hospital.

Iyad Abu Mustafa: “The occupying state continues to carry out brutal operations day after day. Yesterday, 18 martyrs were killed, and this morning, more than 10 martyrs. The number of martyrs has reached more than 44,000 martyrs. This escalation indicates a crime of genocide, a well-organized crime. Every bloodbath is a crime in itself. There is no country in the world that is able to stop these serious violations against the Palestinian people. The United States is still taking the neutral stance and is blindly biased toward the occupying Israeli state.”

Meanwhile, Israel says it retrieved the bodies of six hostages from Khan Younis overnight. The families of hostages have been calling on Netanyahu to work toward a ceasefire in Gaza for months.

In Wisconsin, a Kenosha County court has sentenced Chrystul Kizer to 11 years in prison after she pleaded guilty to charges related to the killing in self-defense of the man who sex trafficked and assaulted her in 2018. She was 17 at the time; he had abused her since she was 16. Court records show Kenosha police knew the man, Randall Volar, who was white, had a history of sexually abusing Black girls and was under investigation for sex trafficking, but he remained free for months. Kizer says she shot and killed Volar in self-defense after he drugged her and tried to rape her.

Georgia’s Republican-controlled Election Board approved a new rule Monday giving county election board officials more power to “examine” votes after Election Day, a move which could delay the certification of results and allow officials who are unhappy with the results to sow chaos and doubt over the election. ProPublica reports the new rule was pushed by the far-right group Election Integrity Network, which is run by Cleta Mitchell, an election denier who tried to help Trump overturn his loss in Georgia in 2020.

In New York, former Republican Congressmember George Santos pleaded guilty to federal wire fraud and identity theft charges. Among other things, Santos admitted to defrauding his donors by using their money for personal use and charging their cards without authorization, as well as lying about his finances on House disclosure forms. Santos’s guilty plea comes just weeks before he was scheduled to stand trial. In 2023, he was expelled from the House in a rare move, putting an end to his brief congressional career. Santos will be sentenced in February. He faces at least two years in prison. This is Nassau District Attorney Anne Donnelly.

Anne Donnelly: “George Santos is many things. He’s a liar. He’s a master manipulator and a con man. But one thing he’s not, he’s not above the law.”

The advocacy group Tax Justice Network said that even a modest wealth tax on the world’s richest could easily raise $2 trillion each year, more than enough to help poorer nations become climate-resilient and transition to clean energy. The group cited Spain’s “solidarity surcharge,” implemented less than two years ago, which raised hundreds of millions of euros last year simply by imposing a small, progressive tax on the net worth of the 0.5% richest households. The Tax Justice Network released its proposal for a global tax on the ultra-rich ahead of November’s U.N. Climate Change Conference.

The Southern African Development Community warned some 68 million people, nearly one-fifth of the population of southern Africa, are suffering from the effects of a severe climate change-fueled drought.

Meanwhile, Azerbaijan is sounding the alarm over the “catastrophic” shrinking of the Caspian Sea due to changes in the climate. Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev said he discussed the situation with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday.

President Ilham Aliyev: “From the window of the room where we held talks, I showed Vladimir Putin the rocks that were under water two years ago, and today they have already emerged a meter above the surface. And we are seeing this along the entire coast of the Absheron Peninsula, and not only there, along the entire coast of Azerbaijan.”

The Caspian Sea is the world’s largest inland body of water and is bordered by Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Iran and Turkmenistan. Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, will host November’s upcoming U.N. climate talks.

In some more hopeful climate news, environmental groups in the U.S. hailed a “major milestone” as new federal data revealed wind and solar overtook energy production from coal in the first half of the year, and the trend is likely to continue for the rest of 2024. Ben Jealous, head of the Sierra Club, said the news represents a “significant win for clean energy advocates, for ratepayers, and for people and communities across the country that simply want to breathe clean air, drink safe water, and worry less about climate disasters like floods and wildfires.”

Another speaker to take the stage at the DNC last night was United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain.

Shawn Fain: “So, for us in the labor movement, it’s real simple: Kamala Harris is one of us. She’s a fighter for the working class. And Donald Trump is a scab!”

As the DNC got underway, hundreds of nurses from the University of Illinois Hospital stood on the picket line as they kicked off a weeklong strike just a few miles away from the convention center. The Illinois Nurses Association says UI Health has refused to address understaffing, unsafe working conditions and fair pay demands.

In more labor news, over 1,000 workers at New York’s Cornell University are on strike over pay and benefits and over Cornell’s refusal to negotiate in good faith. The strike comes as Cornell students started streaming onto campus for the start of the new school year. The Cornell employees, which include maintenance and dining room staff, gardeners and custodians, say they cannot afford to live near campus on their salary and often struggle to afford other basic necessities. They are unionized with United Auto Workers. UAW President Shawn Fain gave the striking Cornell workers a shoutout from the DNC stage last night.

Ukraine has ordered families to evacuate Russia’s eastern city of Pokrovsk as Ukrainian forces continue to advance in Russia’s Kursk region. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Monday Ukrainian attacks in the region showed Moscow’s threats of retaliation were a “bluff.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky: “We are now experiencing an extremely important ideological shift. Namely, the entire naive, illusory concept of so-called red lines regarding Russia, which dominated the assessment of the war by some of our partners, has crumbled these days somewhere near Sudzha. … Russian military bases and Russian military airfields, Russian logistics and other military facilities, whose existence allows Putin to avoid seeking peace, are entirely legitimate targets for our defense forces.”

In Mexico, unions representing judicial workers launched an indefinite strike Monday as lawmakers prepare to vote on a highly contested court reform. Judges joined other court employees in opposing the proposed overhaul, which would see judges, including those on the Mexican Supreme Court, be elected by the people. The striking unions warned courts are the “only counterweight” to the ruling Morena party’s authority. This is judicial employee María Cisneros speaking in Mexico City.

María Cisneros: “We are not against reform; all reforms are good, but not from a discourse of hatred, polarization, and saying that the judiciary is evil, that the judiciary is corrupt.”

In India, hundreds of thousands of doctors have prolonged their nationwide strike over the rape and murder of a young medical trainee in a Kolkata hospital earlier this month. Doctors at public hospitals turned away all but emergency patients Monday as they continued to take to the streets in protest.

Dr. Rajni: “This is not a rape of a doctor. It’s not a rape of a doctor. It’s a rape of a daughter. She was a daughter. She was a sister, someone’s sister. So, if we do not raise a voice for ourselves, then no one ever will. For this, we are here.”

In health news, authorities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo say they are hopeful the country will receive its first doses of mpox vaccines by next week, after pledges from the U.S. and Japan. The World Health Organization declared mpox a global public health emergency last week. But the disease has overwhelmingly affected West and Central African nations so far, especially the DRC, where mpox was already endemic but access to vaccines is low or nonexistent. One of the strains detected is believed to be more lethal than previous ones. Even when not deadly, mpox can cause fever, rashes and extremely painful lesions. Children are particularly vulnerable.

Meanwhile, shares of mpox vaccine manufacturers are surging following the WHO public health emergency declaration. GeoVax Labs, Tonix Pharmaceuticals and Emergent BioSolutions are some of the companies hoping to profit from the mpox crisis.