--:-- Tracy Mumford: From the New York Times, it's the headlines. Today's Thursday, August 22nd.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Your vice president candidate said you were contemplating dropping out. Are you?
--:-- Bobby: Thank you, Bobby.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s bid for the White House appears to be almost over. The Times has learned that Kennedy is expected to end his presidential campaign this week. And that he's in talks to endorse Donald Trump. His campaign has said that Kennedy will announce his path forward tomorrow. And three people familiar with his plans say that while he could change his mind, discussions are underway for him to appear alongside Trump at a rally in Arizona.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Kennedy's exit from the race, less than three months before the election, would close out one of the most durable third-party presidential bids in modern American history. Earlier this year, some polls had Kennedy pulling in double-digit support, with the potential to draw a meaningful number of votes away from both Democrats and Republicans. But in recent weeks, his poll numbers have plunged, his campaign has been running out of cash, and his efforts to get on state ballots have been caught up in legal challenges.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Meanwhile, in Chicago last night... You might not know it, but I haven't given a lot of big speeches like this.
--:-- Tim Walls: [speaking in a high-energy tone] It's the fourth quarter. We're down a field goal, but we're on offense and we've got the ball. We're driving down the field. And boy, do we have the right team.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Democrats are hoping that Walls' Midwestern background, including his love of football and hunting, will help win over white working-class voters, particularly men who've been turning away from the party in recent years.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: We got 76 days. That's nothing. There'll be time to sleep when you're dead. We're going to leave it on the field.
--:-- Tim Walls: [continuing in a high-energy tone] Walls' self-described pep talk was all part of the high-energy lead-up to the convention's main event, Kamala Harris' speech, which she'll give tonight.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: People close to the campaign tell The Times that Harris feels like this speech is one of the most crucial moments of her campaign. She's been going through her script line by line with her speechwriter who used to work for President Obama. And she practiced the speech teleprompters included at least three times between other campaign events.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: This is not the speech that the vice president anticipated she would be giving just four weeks ago. And now she's had to prepare to introduce herself to the broader political world.
--:-- Maya King: In my reporting, largely talking to party organizers and strategists, one concern that they have expressed is the handful of independent voters and swing voters who might not yet be sold on her.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: I think both parties recognize that this is an election that will really come down to the margins. And so every vote is going to matter here. And having a message that appeals to the folks who say they don't know her very well quite yet or just might have some skepticism about how she would govern and what her policy portfolio would be, this is her chance to talk to them as well tonight.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Campaign officials say Harris will try to do three main things in her speech. Tell the story of her journey from a middle-class background to the vice presidency. Frame Donald Trump's campaign as dangerous and backwards-looking. And make an unabashed appeal to patriotism, a theme that has usually been embraced by Republicans.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Live coverage of the speech with analysis from Times reporters will be at nytimes.com.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: On Wednesday, the Labor Department came out with revised numbers for how the job market's been doing, and they show the U.S. economy has added far fewer jobs than previously thought. From last March to this March, the data shows the U.S. added 818,000 fewer jobs than the Labor Department originally reported.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Revising the numbers like this happens every year, as more detailed data comes in. But this year's revision is unusually large and could be the latest sign of potential weakness in the job market. Still, experts say the update doesn't change the larger economic picture. Job growth is slowing but not collapsing. And the unemployment rate is rising, but layoffs are still low.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: MIT the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has announced that the first class of freshmen it admitted since the Supreme Court banned affirmative action is significantly less racially and ethnically diverse than previous years. The school is the first major university to release admissions data since the court race can no longer be considered.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The number of incoming students at MIT who are Black, Latino, Native American, or Pacific Islander is now 16 percent, down from about 25 percent. Meanwhile, the number of admitted students who are Asian American, rose from 40 percent to 47.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: In a statement, MIT's president said the ruling essentially undid decades of work the school had put in to achieve racial and ethnic diversity. But the founder of the group that pushed for the nationwide ban on affirmative action said that every incoming student to MIT will now know, quote, that they were accepted only based on their outstanding academic and extracurricular achievements, not the color of their skin.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: MIT's results are consistent with what's happened when affirmative action was banned at a state level. Public universities in both California and Michigan saw notable drop-offs in the number of Black students after they could no longer take race under consideration.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Overnight, freight traffic on Canada's railroads came to a standstill after the country's two main rail companies locked out their employees in a labor dispute. The companies, Canadian National and Canadian Pacific Kansas City, have told 10,000 employees not to show up, halting trains and potentially disrupting the supply chain.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The companies had been negotiating with the workers since September. Some of the key sticking points have been over scheduling and concerns about workers' fatigue. The shutdown could have serious economic consequences, By one estimate, half of all Canadian exports are moved by trains.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Timing-wise, it's right at the start of the grain harvest, and farmers may have to stockpile their grain for now. It could also affect major car companies. Honda and Toyota both have large factories in Canada, and those finished vehicles are mostly sent to the U.S. on trains, which are now stopped.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And finally, the Times has been reporting on how Mennonite communities are expanding in Latin America. The religious communities started moving there about a century ago, and there are now more than 200 settlements in the region, covering almost 10 million acres of land.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Some have carved out colonies deep in the Amazon rainforest. They are defined in a lot of ways by rejecting modern technology and trying to live separate from the rest of the world. But another thing is that land is pretty cheap there, and they don't mind doing the work to clear the forest. And they want to have large tracts of land in order to kind of maintain their lifestyle.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Reporter Mitra Taj traveled by plane, boat, and motorcycle to reach two of the colonies in Peru's part of the Amazon. When we arrived, it was kind of like being almost like in a different country. Didn't really look like Peru anymore. It was very kind of orderly streets, very square fields, not at all like typical Peruvian farms, which tend to be smaller, kind of big fields that would just run up right into the forest.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: There's horse-drawn buggies moving around, boys collecting milk and canisters. But there were signs of the Amazon everywhere. Where the first person we spoke with, the leader of the colony Providencia, had a parrot in his house that would speak the German dialect that the Mennonites speak in.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Mitra says that in Peru, there are now growing tensions around the Mennonites' use of the forest. The government has opened investigations into the communities for clearing the forest without required permits, something they deny. And environmentalists are also raising concerns that the colonies are damaging the rainforest and exacerbating climate change.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The Amazon is already under stress from much larger threats like logging, cattle ranching, and mining. The Mennonites themselves say they do acknowledge that they cleared forests in order to build their colony, but they look around and they say the forest is big. And they weren't familiar with the term climate change, so they weren't familiar with the role that the trees and keeping the trees standing plays in avoiding worsening climate change.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: But it will be interesting to see if authorities are able to stop Mennonites from expanding into the forest to see how quickly and whether or not these Mennonite colonies expand as they have in other countries. These are people that are trying really hard to live apart from the rest of the world. But once a colony is successful enough, rooted enough, it gets big enough for other people in the colonies to want to break off and start a new colony somewhere that's even more remote.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, how a Republican takeover of an obscure election board in Georgia could shape the 2024 election. You can listen on The Times audio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.
