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HARI SREENIVASAN, PBS NEWSHOUR WEEKEND ANCHOR: Good evening and thanks for joining us.

As about 5,000 delegates are descending on Philadelphia for the Democratic National Convention that starts tomorrow, the party is experiencing a change in leadership. Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, quit her post today, following the leak of embarrassing e-mails. Wasserman Schultz who just yesterday introduced Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine at the ticket rollout in Miami had succeeded Kaine as party chair five and a half years ago.

Her resignation comes two days after WikiLeaks released 19,000 party e-mails, some suggesting officials worked to undermine the campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. In one, Wasserman Schultz called Sanders campaign manager a liar. In another, party officials suggested questioning Sanders Jewish faith as a wedge with Southern voters.

Donna Brazile, a long time political strategist who ran Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 2000, will serve as interim party chair.

Earlier today, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager blamed Russian hackers for the e-mail breach.

ROBBY MOOK, HILLARY FOR AMERICA CAMPAIGN MANAGER: Our experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these e-mails and other experts are now saying that the Russians are releasing these e-mails for the purpose of actually helping Donald Trump.

SREENIVASAN: The Trump campaign spokesman tells the “NewsHour”, the Clinton campaign’s time would be better spent apologizing to Bernie Sanders for the mistreatment he received at the hands of the Democratic National Committee.

Joining us to talk about the implications of Debbie Wasserman Schultz stepping down is Jeff Greenfield.

Jeff, put this in context for us at the eve of the major event for the political party, the leadership changes?

JEFF GREENFIELD, NEWSHOUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, like they say about the secret of good comedy, timing is everything. There is a heat wave hitting here, but that’s nothing compared to the political heat that was rising around the DNC and the Clinton campaign in the wake of those revelations from WikiLeaks. The Sanders people had long suspected that the DNC was in league with the Clintons and these leaked documents seem to undermine that or support it.

And there was no way the Democrats could conduct a week long convention with the constant drum beat of anger and demands that Debbie Wasserman Schultz step down. So, she fell on her sword.

SREENIVASAN: We know the intent of the party’s decision here, to try to make this perhaps a healing moment where they can get over this. But does this potentially add more fuel to those Bernie Sanders who feel slighted throughout the entire process?

GREENFIELD: Look, it’s possible that they think that having scored one kill, they may start ratcheting up demands, maybe trying to refocus on the superdelegate issue.

But the other part is that the Democrats have made much sport out of all the stumbles on the Republican campaign, the plagiarism, the Ted Cruz blowup, all that stuff. It’s very hard for the Democrats now to argue, we know how to run a campaign. We know how to run a convention. Therefore, we know how to run the country.

So, I think we’re not likely to see the end of the turmoil but at least the most visible target has now been removed.

SREENIVASAN: So, what are the practical implications, does it affect the speaker line-up. Is there likely to be any sort of a change that the audience at home sees?

GREENFIELD: No. I think the convention will go on as planned. They’ve got their 60 plus speakers. There is no reason why the removal of Schultz should cause any change in that.

The question, and you raised it earlier, is this going to embolden the Sanders people to try to make floor fights out of issues that they in the past have said, OK, we’ll settle this in committee. I wish I could tell you the answer to that, but as I often said, if I could see the future, I’d buy the Powerball ticket.

SREENIVASAN: You know, people forget sometimes that not only is this a place for speeches, but this is actually the place where the party platform gets hammered out. Whether Bernie Sanders has some influence on this entire process, it’s actually happening in committee meetings that are very boring and long and don’t really get national primetime television attention.

GREENFIELD: That’s right. Unless the Sanders people decide to take the power they have and now force a floor fight, it is possible that on a couple of these issues which sometimes do make the eyes glaze over, they will have that power. The question now is, is the resignation of Schultz enough for them to say, OK, let’s move on, or whether there are, we won’t call them “Never Trumpers” or “Never Clintonites” but the kind of hard-bitten opponents of the establishment Democrats, are they going to say, “You know what, let’s go for another kill”?

And that’s not what Secretary Clinton or the Democratic National Committee wants to hear.

SREENIVASAN: All right. Jeff Greenfield, joining us from Philadelphia tonight — thanks so much.

GREENFIELD: Nice to be here.

The post How will leadership changes affect the DNC? appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders embrace during a campaign rally where Sanders endorsed Clinton in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, U.S., July 12, 2016. Photo by REUTERS/Mary Schwalm

PHILADELPHIA — Democrats vowed that their convention would be an orderly and united affair, in contrast with Donald Trump’s coronation at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

But the Wikileaks release of dozens of emails by Democratic National Committee staff, combined with Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s decision on Sunday to step down as DNC chairwoman in response to the leak undercut the convention’s opening night theme of “United Together.”

READ MORE: Pence appears to contradict Trump’s stance on NATO in PBS NewsHour interview

The leaked emails showed party officials, who are supposed to remain neutral during the primaries, discussing ways to harm Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign.

The emails provided evidence for the argument that Sanders and many of his supporters have been making all along: that the political system is “rigged” in favor of establishment candidates.

The controversial emails and Schultz’s resignation came at a particularly bad time for Clinton, who is still struggling to win over Sanders supporters and put the primary season behind her.

Monday night’s program was designed to appeal to liberals in the party, with speeches from Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, both of whom have endorsed Clinton and could lend a progressive voice to her campaign.

FOLLOW: PBS NewsHour’s 2016 DNC Convention Live blog

But it remains unclear if their prime-time speeches will convince disgruntled Sanders supporters to back Clinton in the general election.

A quarter of Sanders voters said they won’t back Clinton in the general election, according to a new CNN/ORC poll released Monday. Other studies suggest that number could be smaller, however: a recent Pew survey found that 90 percent of “consistent” Sanders supporters prefer Clinton over Trump.

Overall, the CNN/ORC poll, which was taken right after the Republican National Convention and reflected a post-convention bump in the polls for Trump, found him leading Clinton by 48 to 45 percent. Clinton had led Trump by nearly double digits in national polls earlier this month.

Republicans argued that the race was narrowing as voters start paying closer attention. “Trump is really better positioned than Clinton for what the electorate says it wants,” said Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma.

“It’s very clear people want change, and I’m sure [at the Democratic National Convention] she’ll try to disqualify the kind of change that Trump is offering,” Cole added. “But what kind of change Clinton is going to offer is the key challenge for her.”

There were early signs that the convention won’t be as smooth as party leaders hoped.

As anger mounted over the DNC’s leaked emails on Sunday, Sanders supporters rallied in downtown Philadelphia, chanting “Hell no, DNC, we won’t vote for Hillary.”

Pro-Sanders groups are planning to hold demonstrations throughout the week, ensuring that the divisions in the Democratic Party will remain on display even as the party’s top leaders gather to present a unified front against Trump.

Michelle Obama is scheduled to speak on Monday, followed by former President Bill Clinton on Tuesday. President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will speak on Wednesday night. Sen. Tim Kaine, Clinton’s newly selected running mate, will also deliver a prime-time address.

The roster of high-profile Democrats stands in marked contrast to last week’s convention. The two living former Republican presidents and the party’s last two presidential nominees refused to attend the event in order to signal their discomfort with Trump’s candidacy.

On Monday, Democratic insiders said they were confident the convention’s keynote speakers would give voters a stark choice between Clinton and Trump, who delivered an unusually dark nominating speech in Cleveland.

The convention’s main speakers “need to inspire people and draw people in as opposed to try and frighten them as we saw last week,” said Jerry Crawford, an Iowa attorney who has served as a campaign adviser to both Clintons.

Democrats are also hoping voters will draw inspiration from Clinton’s history-making speech on Thursday night, when she will become the first female major-party presidential nominee in U.S. history.

“That deserves a fair amount of attention. It’s a big deal,” said Ellen Fitzpatrick, a historian at the University of New Hampshire. “When the attention is focused on Clinton directly, when she has air time to really speak to the country, she does well.”

The post Will Bernie Sanders’ speech restore unity after DNC email scandal? appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Counter Culture Labs in Oakland wants to disrupt the medical industry. Photo by Andrew Stelzer/KQED

How many times have you had a conversation about when are “they” going to find a cure for the common cold, or make decent-tasting vegan cheese? Well, what if you had a chance to do it yourself?

That’s the idea behind the trend of do-it-yourself biohacking: to get regular people involved in scientific discovery. A group of DIY scientists at a new crowdfunded lab in Oakland are doing just that.

The lab tables at Counter Culture Labs look official: They’re covered with beakers, pipettes and fancy-looking equipment. But the walls look like an artist’s studio, with huge graffiti murals.

The current discussion is about who’s next to use the lab’s autoclave — that’s a pressurized heating chamber. Maggie Richani, who’s working on a team developing vegan cheese, offers to double up with the group extracting DNA from mushrooms.

“We share everything here,” says Richani, as she squishes several glass containers inside.

Counter Culture Labs has about 35 dues-paying members and dozens of volunteers. Tamari Kirtadze. who’s been coming here while she searches for a job in chemical engineering, says it keeps her skills fresh, and it’s a chance to learn from and teach people.

“If you’re interested and you’re willing to do something … and help out any way you can, we are welcoming to people,” says Kirtadze.

“I’ve seen other hacker spaces where they require you to take certain classes before they allow you to do anything,” she adds.

The projects are as varied as the participants. In addition to developing vegan cheese, another group is trying to make an eco-friendly sunscreen. And the focus of tonight’s weekly meeting is the Open Insulin Project.

“The goal is to make and purify human insulin, and we want to do that in the simplest and least expensive way possible,” says Anthony DiFranco, who helped start the Open Insulin Project.

Anthony DiFranco supervises volunteers using the autoclave Photo by Andrew Stelzer/KQED

DiFranco’s a Type 1 diabetic himself, which means he needs to use insulin to balance his blood sugar. Here in the lab, he and the team are using E. coli to try and produce something biologically similar to insulin.

“The first synthetic insulin was E. coli-based … there’s a whole lineage of techniques that subsequently developed,” explains DiFranco.

Today a group of volunteers is shining an ultraviolet light onto a petri dish. If they see a green fluorescent glow, it’s a protein, and it could be attached to an insulin precursor. DiFranco sees what might be a bit of glowiness, but knows it’s no guarantee. In fact, he’s well aware that this whole idea might not work. But whatever discoveries come out of the group work here will be open source — the data will be available online, for anyone to use.

Patrik D’haeseleer, chair and founding member of Counter Culture Labs, says the team hopes to supplement the global supply of insulin. A 2015 report from the World Health Organization found three-quarters of low-income countries and almost half of lower-middle income countries did not have insulin available in the public health sector.

Some of the many projects taking place at Counter Culture Labs Photo by Andrew Stelzer/KQED

“There’s entire countries that run out of insulin for months in a row, which is essentially a death sentence for a Type 1 diabetic,” explains D’haeseleer.

“We want to get past this hurdle where everything is essentially locked up in intellectual property and owned by three large pharmaceutical companies,” he adds.

D’haeseleer is a disrupter at heart. He hopes several companies will take the lab’s techniques and produce more generic insulin, driving down the price all over the globe.

But Dr. Carl Peck, who teaches at UC San Francisco, says he’s skeptical that whatever comes of the Open Insulin Project could eventually make it to consumers.

“There’s so many factors here that make this a very ambitious project,” says Peck, who estimates developing and marketing a new drug can cost up to $1 billion. Even a basic generic will cost tens of millions.

“Think about their end goal and what the obstacles are to get there. And it’s gonna be money, it’s gonna be regulation, and it’s gonna be ultimately their own responsibility in developing a safe product that actually works,” says Peck, who was formerly the head of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research,

The folks at Counter Culture Labs say that if they get far enough to develop a product, they plan to partner with an established lab for clinical trials. And they’re collaborating with Biocurious, another DIY lab in Sunnyvale. DiFranco says opening up the process is almost as significant as the result.

“We’re showing that people can do this on a very small scale, and we’re documenting how that’s done and sharing that information,” says DiFranco.

It may seem far-fetched, but here in the Bay Area, this is how a lot of the things that rule the world got started. And if they don’t succeed at making insulin, there’s always vegan cheese.

This article is reproduced with permission from KQED Science. It was first published on July 25, 2016. Find the original story here.

The post Oakland hackers take a stab at making crowdfunded insulin appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Singer Demi Lovato rehearses for her performance before the start of the at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. July 25, 2016. REUTERS/Jim Young

PHILADELPHIA — Hillary Clinton’s campaign scrambled to extinguish a political firestorm over embarrassing hacked emails Monday, hoping a high-wattage line-up of speakers, including first lady Michelle Obama and liberal favorite Bernie Sanders, would overshadow party infighting on the Democratic convention’s opening night.

Clinton escaped one potentially ugly moment when outgoing party chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz announced she would not take the stage. The Florida congresswoman was angrily heckled by her own home-state delegation Monday morning, and Democratic officials feared a similar scene in front of a far bigger TV audience.

Wasserman Schultz is leaving her post following the publication of thousands of emails suggesting the Democratic National Committee favored Clinton during her primary contest with Sanders, despite vowing to remain neutral. Sanders and his supporters have long argued that the party was on the side of the former secretary of state.

For Clinton, it was a turbulent start to a historic four-day gathering that will culminate in the nomination of the first woman to lead a major U.S. political party. It also sapped some of Clinton’s energy coming out of Republican Donald Trump’s chaotic convention last week and the well-received rollout Saturday of her running mate, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine.

Sanders will play a crucial role in determining whether Clinton can calm the tensions. He greeted his loyal delegates ahead of his convention address Monday, imploring them to help him elect Clinton and prevent Trump from winning the White House, though he spent little time making a robust case for his former rival.

The frustration some Sanders’ supporters still have with Clinton — a candidate they see as entrenched in a political system they distrust —was evident, with the crowd breaking into a chorus of boos.

“Brothers and sisters, this is the real world that we live in,” Sanders said as he tried to quiet the crowd. “Trump is a bully and a demagogue.”

Sanders was the closing speaker on a night also featuring Mrs. Obama, who remains a wildly popular figure; New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, a young black lawmaker and rising Democratic star, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a favorite of liberals and one of the party’s toughest critics of Trump.

Clinton is promising a stark contrast to last week’s Republican gathering, an often chaotic affair that featured a heavy dose of pessimism about the economy and national security.

At an afternoon rally in North Carolina, Clinton said the Democratic convention would offer a more hopeful, positive vision of the country’s future.

“I don’t see how you run for president of the United States if you spend all your time trash-talking the United States,” she told supporters. “We’re going to have a convention this week that highlights success stories.”

The controversy over some 19,000 leaked DNC emails, however, threatened to complicate those plans. The correspondence, posted by WikiLeaks over the weekend, showed top officials at the supposedly neutral DNC favoring Clinton over Sanders in the presidential primaries.

Clinton campaign officials blamed the hack, which is now being investigated by the FBI, on Russian military intelligence agencies. The campaign also accused Moscow of trying to meddle in the U.S. election and help Trump, who has said he might not necessarily defend NATO allies if they are attacked by Russia.

“We don’t have information right now about that, but what we have is a kind of bromance going on between Vladimir Putin and Trump which is distinct from this leak,” Clinton adviser John Podesta said in an MSNBC interview.

Trump dismissed the suggestion in a tweet: “The joke in town is that Russia leaked the disastrous DNC emails, which should never have been written (stupid), because Putin likes me.”

A cybersecurity firm the Democrats employed found traces of at least two sophisticated hacking groups on their network — both of which have ties to the Russian government. Those hackers took at least a year’s worth of detailed chats, emails and research on Trump, according to a person knowledgeable of the breach who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

Regardless of the origins of the hack, it was Wasserman Schultz who bore the brunt of the political fallout. Long a controversial figure, she found herself with little support from the Clinton campaign or the White House over the weekend, and by Sunday afternoon, announced she would resign.

But the congresswoman had hoped to still fulfill her official duties in Philadelphia, taking the stage to gavel the convention in and out — scenarios that became untenable by midday Monday.

“I have decided that in the interest of making sure that we can start the Democratic convention on a high note that I am not going to gavel in the convention,” she told a newspaper in her south Florida district, the Sun-Sentinel.

For Sanders’ supporters, it was a high-profile victory. But it did little to temper their ongoing concerns about the woman at the top of the Democratic ticket.

“We are all scared of Donald Trump, but we also have misgivings about Hillary,” said Bruce Fealk, a Sanders delegate from Michigan.

The post Hillary Clinton’s campaign tries to reset Democratic National Convention appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

The Naegleria fowleri amoeba seen under the microscope. Photo by Dr. Visvesvara/CDC

The deaths hit the headlines every summer, sometimes five or six of them across the country. They’re newsworthy for their rarity and for how innocuous the events leading up to them are — it’s usually a young person who was swimming in a lake, got some water up their nose, and within days, was dead.

The cause is an amoeba called Naegleria fowleri, which when it infects the brain, causes massive swelling that is almost always fatal. Over the past half-decade, 137 people in the U.S. have died of the infection.

That rarity means that hardly any research money exists to find treatments. The best line of attack at present is a combination of drugs designed for other conditions.

“Even with the best drug combinations, the fatality rate is over 98 percent,” said Dennis Kyle, an infectious disease researcher at the University of South Florida. “People are dying from this disease all the time, and we really have nothing to treat it effectively.”

But Kyle and his team are working to change that reality. Borrowing from techniques used to develop drugs for diseases like malaria, they have created the first high-volume screening setup to hunt for compounds that kill N. fowleri. With the help of collaborators, Kyle has amassed a collection of over 30,000 natural compounds gathered from far-flung corners of the globe, including microbes fished out of mangrove swamps, salty Antarctic oceans, and off sea sponges in the Gulf of Mexico.

Adding this supply to their arsenal of synthetic compounds and already-approved FDA drugs, the team is optimistic that they will eventually find something that can enter the human brain and take the amoeba out.

Chemical warfare

The amoebas, which are thought to thrive in the soil and scum layers of warm waters, enter the brain when water is forced up the nose. Once there, they feed on brain matter, leading to rapid inflammation. Of all U.S. victims, only three have survived. The antimicrobial drug miltefosine is the most promising existing treatment, and is credited with helping save two children in 2013. But it’s considered an investigational treatment, and others treated with the drug have not survived.

Kyle and his group hope that a systematic survey of natural compounds will turn up a better drug.

“We think that microorganisms use chemical warfare — if you like — to kill other things that might be fighting for the same resources,” said Cedric Pearce, one of Kyle’s collaborators and founder of Mycosynthetix, a small company which boasts a library of 55,000 fungal strains from all over the world.

Read More: A radically simple idea may open the door to a new world of antibiotics

Kyle’s lab can screen about 7,500 compounds in 72 hours, an improvement over other methods that took scientists about a week to evaluate a handful of candidate molecules. The speed not only allows his team to examine more compounds, it also means they are screening for fast-acting compounds — an important consideration for an infection that can kill within days of initial symptoms. In test-tube studies, some of these fast-acting compounds are 20 times more potent than miltefosine. Pearce said the team has already identified hundreds of compounds that kill amoeba in the lab.

A different tack to finding a treatment for N. fowleri infection is being pursued by a research group in Seattle. Rather than broadly screening a bunch of compounds in a bottom-up fashion, the Seattle Structural Genomics Center for Infectious Disease aims to design a drug from the top down. They are using X-rays to understand the structure of proteins that keep N. fowleri alive, and then using computer modeling to develop compounds to target them.

Working alongside Kyle, the Seattle group is in the early stages of investigating 157 different N. fowleri proteins. The researchers hope their different approaches will meet in the middle, said Robin Stacy, senior project manager for the center, using computer modeling to tweak Kyle’s most promising compounds.

Cedric Pearce stands in his culture room surrounded by a quarter of a million test tubes filled with fungi. Photo by David Wilson/Chris English/UNC Greensboro

Last year Kyle’s group reported their first drug candidates, after screening about 150 synthetic antimicrobial chemicals. The team is now testing eight of those compounds in mice, hoping to identify versions that can cross the blood-brain barrier. At the same time, they continue to search for even more potent compounds from nature.

Their work “looks quite promising,” said Elizabeth Winzeler, a developmental biologist who studies malaria at the University of California, San Diego, and who is not involved in the research. “We and others in the field have used the same kind of approach and it’s worked quite well” to develop treatments against malaria. She cautioned, though, that the steps in drug development are numerous and complex and that it’s not unusual for a decade to pass between the discovery of molecular candidates and when drugs make it to the shelf.

A moving target

Finding a treatment may be more important than ever as unusual cases have startled U.S. health officials in the last five years. Infections contracted in Minnesota lakes — 600 miles farther north than ever before — and the first deaths from treated tap water have led some experts to hypothesize that a changing climate is expanding the range and transmission routes of these amoebas.

“It’s not hypothetical. It’s occurring,” said Michael Beach, associate director of the healthy water division of the CDC’s National Center for Emerging, Zoonotic, and Infectious Diseases. “We’ve seen first cases in Kansas, first cases in Indiana, first cases in Minnesota, and the first case since 1969 in Virginia.”

Beach urges awareness but not fear. To reduce the already-tiny risk of infection, the CDC recommends people use distilled and sterile water for nasal rinses, not submerge their heads in warm and brackish water, and consider wearing nose clips during water sports.

Read More: The superbugs are winning the battle against us

Funding for research, meanwhile, has been rising but is still sparse. The National Institutes of Health awarded less than $800,000 in grants to scientists studying N. fowleri for 2016 — and about two-thirds of that went to Kyle and Pearce’s group.

One reason for the low dollar amount is the rarity of the disease relative to others, says Lee Hall, chief of the Parasitology and International Programs Branch of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Another is that few researchers have applied for grants to study this disease.

Kyle and Pearce are planning to apply for a new grant in September, and this time they will be asking for “a lot more money,” said Pearce.

“There’s a significant need for more research,” said Kyle. “Better awareness of this in the research community is as important as it is in the general community.”

This article is reproduced with permission from STAT. It was first published on July 22, 2016. Find the original story here.

The post The global fight against deadly brain-eating amoeba is gaining ground appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

A knife-wielding man killed more than a dozen near Tokyo early Tuesday morning. Photo by PBS NewsHour

A man killed more than a dozen people early Tuesday morning at a Japanese facility for the disabled, according to the Associated Press.

The attack occurred in Sagamihara, a city 30 miles west of Tokyo, according to the nation’s public broadcasting organization NHK. NHK reported 15 dead and 45 injured, while the Kyodo news agency cited 19 dead and 20 injured.

Police said a suspect had surrendered to authorities, according to the AP. The suspect is a 26-year-old former employee of the facility.

This story will be updated

The post At least 15 dead, dozens injured in knife attack at Japanese facility for the disabled appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders shake hands at the start of their debate hosted by CNN and New York One at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York in April 2016. Photo By Brian Snyder/Reuters

PHILADELPHIA — Former rivals Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders urgently joined forces Monday to tamp down dissent among his supporters, as Democrats tried to keep infighting from overtaking an opening night featuring some of the party’s biggest stars, including first lady Michelle Obama.

It was unclear whether the efforts would succeed. Chants of “Bernie” echoed through the arena, and boos could be heard nearly every time Clinton’s name was raised.

For Clinton, it was a turbulent start to a historic four-day gathering that will culminate in the nomination of the first woman to lead a major U.S. political party. It also sapped some of Clinton’s energy coming out of Republican Donald Trump’s chaotic convention last week and the well-received rollout Saturday of her running mate, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine.

FOLLOW: PBS NewsHour’s 2016 Democratic National Convention Live Blog

Sanders scored a major victory with the forced resignation of party chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz following the release of emails showing her staff favored Clinton during the primary despite vows of neutrality. But Sanders’ aides reached out to the Clinton campaign Monday afternoon to express concerns that the chairwoman’s ouster wouldn’t be enough to keep supporters from disrupting the convention, according to a Democratic official.

The discussions between the two camps prompted Sanders to send emails and text messages to supporters asking them not to protest.

“Our credibility as a movement will be damaged by booing, turning of backs, walking out or other similar displays,” Sanders wrote.

Moments after the convention opened in sweltering Philadelphia, the DNC also apologized to Sanders and his backers “for the inexcusable remarks made over email.” The statement was signed by DNC leaders, though Wasserman Schultz’s name was notably absent.

The Florida congresswoman’s resignation is effective later this week, though she also stepped down from her official convention duties. The mere sight of her on stage had been expected to prompt strong opposition from Sanders’ backers.

Sanders was a relatively unknown Vermont senator when he decided to challenge for the Democratic nomination. He stunned the Clinton campaign with his broad support among young people and liberals, as well as his online fundraising prowess. But he struggled to appeal to black voters and couldn’t match the former secretary of state’s ties to the Democratic establishment that wields significant power in the primary process.

Much of Monday’s program appeared aimed at giving Sanders’ backers an opportunity to express their support for him and their frustration with Clinton. Sanders was delivering the night’s closing address, just after Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, another favorite of liberals and one of the party’s toughest critics of Trump.

Sanders previewed his remarks during an appearance earlier Monday before supportive delegates. He implored them to vote for Clinton, generating a chorus of boos.

“Brothers and sisters, this is the real world that we live in,” Sanders said as he tried to quiet the crowd. “Trump is a bully and a demagogue.”

Clinton is promising a stark contrast to last week’s Republican gathering, an often chaotic affair that featured a heavy dose of pessimism about the economy and national security.

“I don’t see how you run for president of the United States if you spend all your time trash-talking the United States,” she told supporters at a rally in North Carolina. “We’re going to have a convention this week that highlights success stories.”

The controversy over some 19,000 leaked DNC emails, however, threatened to complicate those plans. The correspondence, posted by WikiLeaks over the weekend, showed top officials at the supposedly neutral DNC favoring Clinton over Sanders in the presidential primaries.

Clinton campaign officials blamed the hack, which is now being investigated by the FBI, on Russian military intelligence agencies. The campaign also accused Moscow of trying to meddle in the U.S. election and help Trump, who has said he might not necessarily defend NATO allies if they are attacked by Russia.

Trump dismissed the suggestion in a tweet: “The joke in town is that Russia leaked the disastrous DNC emails, which should never have been written (stupid), because Putin likes me.”

A cybersecurity firm the Democrats employed found traces of at least two sophisticated hacking groups on their network — both of which have ties to the Russian government. Those hackers took at least a year’s worth of detailed chats, emails and research on Trump, according to a person knowledgeable of the breach who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

Associated Press writers Kathleen Hennessey, Catherine Lucey and Kathleen Ronayne in Philadelphia, Lisa Lerer in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Jeff Karoub in Detroit contributed to this report.

The post Clinton turns to party’s stars to quiet Democratic firestorm appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

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HARI SREENIVASAN: Finally tonight, our Desperate Journey series continues.

They died horrible deaths. The identities of all but one of them are unknown. And 21 of the 22 will be buried in unmarked graves. They are the victims of a disaster off the Libyan coast last week, when yet another unseaworthy boat, overcrowded with migrants, became a sad statistic to the unscrupulous and cheap traffickers who set them afloat.

The immediate aftermath was witnessed and recorded by “NewsHour” special correspondent Malcolm Brabant, who filmed images in this report that, we should warn, some viewers will find upsetting.

Malcolm spent two weeks on board a rescue ship that is jointly operated by Doctors Without Borders, known as MSF and SOS Mediterranee.

Here’s hi third and final report from aboard the ship Aquarius.

MAN (through translator): French, Arabic, English?

MALCOLM BRABANT: After two weeks at sea, this is the third rescue for the Aquarius.

Multilingual Amani Tekle assures them that deliverance is at hand.

AMANI TEKLE, Coordinator: Stay where you are. We are here to rescue. We are here to take you to Italy, OK? We are a humanitarian organization, so we are here to help you and take you to Italy.

We will take everybody to the big ship, yes? We have enough space for everybody. We will not leave anybody, OK? So, please, just stay where you are.

MALCOLM BRABANT: As the rescuers draw close, initial reports of fatalities are confirmed. Bodies are bobbing backwards and forwards in the half-flooded dinghy.

The stench of fuel is overwhelming. The fumes could cause the survivors to collapse and drown. The priority is to get them off as quickly as possible. A second dinghy is nearby. It’s also overcrowded. Boat number one takes 18 people in relays back to the mother ship.

Boat number two, on which I’m filming, remains on station to prevent more casualties. In their haste to get to safety, the survivors are stepping on the corpses of people who were alive just an hour or so earlier.

Eventually, the last man scrambles on to the rescue craft. And Frenchman Bertrand Thiebault of SOS Mediterranee tries to assess just how many people have died.

During a lull, rescuing people from the second stranded dinghy, he tells me what he knows.

BERTRAND THIEBAULT, SOS Mediterranee: So there were only men who were alive. They were shocked because about 15 women were dead in the middle of the boat because of the fuel inhalation. And we have seen the dead women, and, between the floor and them, about five other ones dead.

MALCOLM BRABANT: This is a new experience for Amani Tekle, a former refugee from Eritrea.

AMANI TEKLE: Today was one of the worst — I mean, one of my worst days, because since we started on the rescue operations this year, I didn’t saw any dead body.

MALCOLM BRABANT: For about half-an-hour, the raft floats free like a ghost ship, before the rescuers attach lines and bring it alongside the Aquarius, where the teams update the death toll, 22 victims, all women, aged between 16 and 30.

So how did this disaster come to pass? David from Nigeria described how the decking on which the people were sitting cracked. Shards of wood punctured the thin rubber, and the women were crushed in the panic.

DAVID, Survivor: The girls were sitting down inside the center.

Then the boys were sitting all around the boat. So, by the time the plywood get boxed, the next time, everybody was running, scattering, running, run to this side, run to this side, run to this side. Then the fuel was not mixing with the water. And we were taking buckets, start baling the water out of the boat, baling water out of the boat. But the water was still gushing inside.

DENNIS OSBI, Survivor: I think the rushing of the men coming forward to where we were standing, that came by the women, but they were sitting down. And if you are coming, you can stomp on them and you move forward.

MALCOLM BRABANT: Eric Felice lost his wife, Texi (ph), in the crush. It happened when salvation appeared on the horizon. But for Texi and the other women, the rescuers were too late.

ERIC FELICE, Widower: As we are coming for the boats, literally, we see the water through the boats. I call out, come to this place. That place is OK. It’s OK. I didn’t know. At the time, we see the rescue, I was happy. I went to call my girl, my woman. She’s already dead. It’s finished.

MALCOLM BRABANT: What happened to her?

ERIC FELICE: I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.

MALCOLM BRABANT: In the small clinic next door to the sanctuary, Dr. Erna Rijnierse prepares 22 death certificates, which she will give to the Italian authorities.

DR. ERNA RIJNIERSE, Doctors Without Borders: People have inhaled fumes. Maybe people have fainted. They went under the other ones, and they asphyxiated. They — they died a horrible death, really, really bad.

And the other thing is, in terms of identification, these people don’t come from places where there’s perfect dental records or other things, so it’s going to be very, very difficult to give them a name and an identity. So we have one, one person that we know. The other ones, we don’t, and I don’t think we will ever find out.

MALCOLM BRABANT: There is an organization which has got the personnel, the technology and the wherewithal to be able to help in this situation. And that’s the International Commission for Missing Persons, which is based in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo.

And it did a fantastic job in identifying the victims of the Srebrenica massacre. Now, the ICMP, as it’s called, has offered to help the Italian authorities to try to identify missing migrants to try to provide some resolution for families who’ve lost relatives along the migrant trail.

But the ICMP doesn’t have sufficient money and will find fund-raising difficult; 36 hours after leaving the accident site, the Aquarius is not far from her base at Trapani in northwest Sicily. The migrants, who’ve been subdued for much of the journey, now liven up at their first sight of Europe, for which they have invested and risked so much.

The reception committee includes the Red Cross, doctors, psychologists and undertakers.

MAN (through translator): The journey was very hard to us, but thank God we’ve reached Italy. Thanks all of you people, because you are the people who saved our lives. Thank God.

MALCOLM BRABANT: The passengers are anxious to get their feet on dry land. But there’s a delay. There’s a dispute between MSF and the Italian authorities about how to proceed. MSF’s Dutch coordinator, Ferry Schippers, is fuming.

FERRY SCHIPPERS, Field Coordinator, Doctors Without Borders: We just heard that the judge here in Trapani wants the dead bodies off first, which is very insensitive. I mean, they are definitely not thinking. We have people on board who have relatives that died on that boat, in that rubber boat that day. And they will see the body bags passing, passing by. I don’t understand this. Believe me, I’m very angry.

MALCOLM BRABANT: But after some robust negotiations, MSF wins the argument and the living are allowed to disembark before the dead.

One of the first to go, newly widowed Eric Felice . The survivors are given a cursory health check by the Italians before going ashore. And then, as sensitively as possible, the 22 victims are carried from the temporary mortuary on the ship’s front deck.

They left Africa with heady dreams of prosperity in Europe. But the sea condemned them to an unmarked grave and a single red rose.

FERRY SCHIPPERS: We’re going to throw this flower in the water out of respect for the people who died in the boat. With these flowers, we sent them goodbye. And let’s hope this will stop.

DR. ERNA RIJNIERSE: We are not dealing with numbers. We are talking about human beings, people like you, like me, and everybody has their own story.

And in my humble experience, nobody runs away from home, nobody leaves everything they know behind because it’s such a good place to be.

MALCOLM BRABANT: The Aquarius is due to return to sea tomorrow.

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Malcolm Brabant in Sicily.

HARI SREENIVASAN: You can watch all of Malcolm Brabant’s reports from the Mediterranean, plus more stories in our Desperate Journey series on our Web site, PBS.org/NewsHour.

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HARI SREENIVASAN:  In the day’s other news:  Reports out of Japan say a man with a knife has killed at least 15 people and wounded 45.  Police say it happened at a facility for the disabled in a town outside Tokyo.  National broadcaster NHK reports the man was a former employee at the facility, and turned himself in after the attack.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility today for Sunday’s suicide bombing in Germany that wounded 15 people.  It was the latest in a series of attacks across the country.

Fatima Manji of Independent Television News reports from Bavaria.

FATIMA MANJI:  Once again, a German city is on high alert after a violent attack, the fourth in what Bavaria’s interior minister called the country’s days of terror.  Last night, a Syrian man blew himself up outside a wine bar just yards away from a music festival where he was refused entry.

MAN (through translator):  Suddenly, there was an extremely loud bang, more like a loud rattle, definitely the sound of an explosion.  I was shaken.  I didn’t know what it was.  I went back away from there.

FATIMA MANJI:  The Bavarian Interior Ministry say a video in Arabic was on the bomber’s phone showing him pledging allegiance to leader of the so-called Islamic State group.

JOACHIM HERRMANN, Bavarian Interior Minister (through translator):  I think this video shows unquestionably that the attack was a terror attack with an Islamist background, that the perpetrator had Islamist convictions.

FATIMA MANJI:  Police say he had a bomb in his backpack with many metal parts that could’ve killed and injured many more people.  Had he been allowed into the crowded event, this could’ve been worse.  The bomber lived at this shelter with other migrants and refugees.

Officials say his application for asylum in Germany had been rejected because he was a registered refugee in Bulgaria, and he was due to be deported there.  The incident comes at the end of a violent week in Germany.  On Friday, a German teenager of Iranian descent shot dead nine people at a shopping center in Munich.

The shooter had a history of mental illness and may have been inspired by the far right.  On Sunday, a 21-year-old Syrian man wielding a machete killed a woman in what police believe was a domestic dispute, all this after an attack in which a 17-year-old asylum-seeker armed with an axe injured five people on a train in Bavaria.  He was shot dead after the attack, which was claimed by the Islamic State group.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  The attacks are fueling renewed debate over Germany’s acceptance of one million migrants and refugees last year.

In Iraq, at least 14 people were killed and dozens were wounded, when a suicide bomber rammed a checkpoint.  It happened at a busy entrance to a Shiite town some 50 miles north of Baghdad.  The Sunni-dominated Islamic State group claimed responsibility.  Meanwhile, a string of bombings inside Baghdad killed nine more people.

Back in this country, police in Fort Myers, Florida, tried to piece together what triggered a shooting attack overnight at a nightclub.  It left two teenagers dead and 17 wounded.  The club had been hosting a swimsuit party for teens.  Police detained three people, and are looking for others, but they do not think it was an act of terror.  The shooting came just over a month after the Orlando nightclub shooting that killed 49 people.

Basketball legend Michael Jordan today pledged $2 million today to help mend relations between police and black communities.  Half will go to the Institute for Community-Police Relations, a program set up by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, and the other half to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.  The NBA Hall of Famer said he can no longer stay silent after recent police-involved shootings and the ambush killings of officers.

A wildfire north of Los Angeles has now forced the evacuation of some 10,000 homes.  The blaze broke out Friday, and has already burned more than 50 square miles, and killed one person.  Flames driven by winds are sweeping through rugged uphill terrain.  Nearly 3,000 firefighters are on the lines, but they say progress is slow.

DREW SMITH, Fire Captain, Los Angeles County Fire Department:  This has been topography-driven.  Wind picks up, and it moves it from south to north at about 7,000 acres a day.  So when the winds surface, we have those wind speeds that’s going to move it across the landscape.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  Making matters worse, triple-digit heat in recent days and years of severe drought.

Verizon made it official today:  It’s buying Internet pioneer Yahoo! for just over $4.8 billion.  The telecom giant bought AOL last year, and hopes the two acquisitions bring new revenue streams from mobile video and advertising.  Yahoo! was once valued at $130 billion, but suffered a severe loss of advertising in recent years, and laid off thousands of employees.

Wall Street’s week opened on a down note, after a four-week rally.  The Dow Jones industrial average lost 77 points to close at 18493.  The Nasdaq fell two points, and the S&P 500 slipped six.

And New Zealand is embarking on an all-out campaign to rid itself of rats by the year 2050.  It’s an effort to save native birds from rodents that eat their eggs and compete for other food.  Rats are not native to New Zealand.  Instead, they arrived with the first ships carrying explorers and colonists.

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GWEN IFILL: With that, we turn to syndicated columnist Mark Shields, New York Times columnist David Brooks and Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report for a special convention edition of Politics Monday.

And since you’re usually in the Politics Monday chair, Amy, I guess I will start with you.

We sat here a week ago in Cleveland and talked about the chaos on the floor of the Republican Convention the first day. And it seems like we have the Democratic version of that.

AMY WALTER, The Cook Political Report: Don’t we?

That unity was the theme that we were going to see from the moment this convention started. Not surprisingly, they are starting off the very first day with Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders to try to quell or at least satisfy this crowd here. But it’s clear that there is a tremendous amount of enthusiasm. You know what I’m — for Bernie Sanders.

What I’m struck by was, in Cleveland, it was the establishment that stayed home and wasn’t there, but the floor was pretty united. There were some dissidents. Here, the establishment is completely united for Hillary Clinton, but the delegates are the ones who are not unified.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Mark Shields, as somebody who’s watched a lot of Democratic Conventions, what do you make of all this?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, I think Amy put her finger on it. This is a convention that one didn’t expect to begin with a political headline that involved the term e-mails, which is one the Democrats would like to avoid from now until November, especially with Russia in the second paragraph.

So I think that in itself is a little disturbing and unsettling. And the Bernie followers, not surprisingly, don’t follow. They are committed. And his endorsement, we will find out if he can deliver and he and Elizabeth Warren together are enough to make the case that it’s time to get in line and support Hillary Clinton.

GWEN IFILL: David Brooks, what does it tell you that the Bernie Sanders supporters, followers don’t follow and that he can say to his people — they sent out a text this afternoon saying, please don’t lead a protest on the floor. And that clearly has continued on. What does it tell us about that movement?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes.

Well, on the one hand, revolutions always devour their own. The French revolutionaries learned this the hard way. And so, in some sense, it’s historical. But I do think something new is happening here, which is that social media is replacing political organizations, and that people who are whipped up by social media and who have a spontaneous, organic grassroots organization, that has its own momentum, its own rules, its own rhetorical etiquette, and it supersedes the stuff we’re normally used to setting here, where people are involved campaign to campaign and their ultimate loyalty to the party.

The people in the Sanders — are passionate, and their ultimate loyal is to the cause and the ideas, and not to the party.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, Amy, how does Hillary Clinton put all this together? We haven’t even begun the first tight in terms of the big speakers. What’s the formula for her?

AMY WALTER: One part is to get the people who — folks in this hall do they believe speak for them, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, to come out right out of the bat.

And I also want to go to David’s points, because I think that is very important. The reality, the sort of interesting — I don’t know if it’s ironic, if I’m using that properly — about the DNC and the e-mails is that all this is coming at a time, we say this is so controversial that the DNC was sort of putting a finger on the scale, or more than a finger, an actual hand on the scale, for Hillary Clinton.

And yet the party apparatus is really pretty worthless. Bernie Sanders was able to raise money without the party. He didn’t need access to their donors. He didn’t need them to give access to the media. He didn’t need them to get access to voter files.

He was able to do that all on his own. So, Reince Priebus from the RNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz from the DNC both finding out that the party in and of itself, as an apparatus, is really — if it’s not — I’m not going to say that it’s dead, but it certainly has not as much life in it that it once did.

GWEN IFILL: Since last we have been around the table, we now have a vice presidential pick from Hillary Clinton, Mark Shields, so what can you tell us about Tim Kaine? And will his — his presence actually on the ticket seems to have upset some Bernie supporters as well.

MARK SHIELDS: The hardest assignment over the weekend for any journalist directed by an editor was to find a Republican to say something negative about Tim Kaine.

When you have got Lamar Alexander, from Bill Bolling, the former lieutenant governor of Virginia, to John McCain, to Jeff Flake saying he’s a great friend, Pat Toomey, who hasn’t endorsed — these are people who haven’t endorsed Donald Trump — basically saying what a wonderful person Tim Kaine is, I have never seen Hillary Clinton look as comfortable in any public setting as she did on Saturday, when she announced Tim Kaine.

She has a partner in Tim Kaine with which she can be comfortable. He’s dependable. He’s unflamboyant, and he’s got her back. And he is not going to embarrass her. And I just think, in that sense, it’s a choice for the long run. It’s a not choice for the short run. It’s not just to win an election. It’s not a — I could see them as a partner if, in fact, she does win in November.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, David Brooks, how does Tim Kaine change anything in this very explosive contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I think he might be a key to some sort of actual electoral majority, or at least a step in that direction.

Listen, since we last met, we have seen some of the polls out of the Republican Convention. The polls are obviously volatile at this time of the year, but nonetheless there was a bump and there was a significant bump. And so it should send a little source of concern, not panic, in Democratic ranks, but there should definitely be concern, because there was a much bigger bounce than I certainly expected.

GWEN IFILL: Well, there was one poll that said there was a bounce. Another poll said…

(CROSSTALK)

DAVID BROOKS: Right. I think there are now a couple showing some sort of bounce.

GWEN IFILL: Yes.

DAVID BROOKS: And so, anyway, something seems to be working.

And the one thing I think the place this election is going to be settled is in suburban service worker office parks, people who are part of the global economy, people who are not upset by necessarily trade or immigration, things like that. And if your party comes out and looking like you’re hostile to the global economy, I think you’re going to have trouble with those people.

And Tim Kaine is very acceptable to your basic moderate independent who might be put off by Trumpianism and Sandersism.

(LAUGHTER)

GWEN IFILL: With the isms.

Tim Kaine also managed somehow to change his mind about the Trans-Pacific trade policy just in time to get this nomination or to get this selection.

Can he be expected to be that bridge, Amy?

AMY WALTER: Well, there are a lot of anti-TPP signs being waved on the floor.

GWEN IFILL: Right.

AMY WALTER: And I think the challenge, at this exact moment, is that Tim Kaine doesn’t excite the base as much as he placates a lot of Republicans and those suburban voters. And so I think Tim Kaine is a longer-run pick.

We talked about why Mike Pence picked by Donald Trump. That was a short-term pick to fix his convention problem and his Republican problem. Hillary Clinton has a longer-term look, which is, I need to go get those suburban women, those college-educated white voters who right now are very skeptical about Donald Trump. Who’s going to win those over? I think Tim Kaine is the reason.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Mark?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, in a year, quite frankly, where it’s been bizarre, whether in fact you have two candidates with negative favorable/unfavorable ratings, you have Bernie Sanders, you have Ted Cruz, you have all the Republicans, Tim Kaine, more than anything, in the phrase of Warren Harding, is a return to normalcy.

He is just so relentlessly normal. I just think there was a sense of relief in the country.

JUDY WOODRUFF: All right.

Well, we can’t wait to spend more time talking to you all tonight and for the rest of this week. Mark Shields, David Brooks, Amy Walter, thank you all.

And we ask you again tune in tonight starting at 8:00 p.m. Eastern for our special NPR/”PBS NewsHour” coverage of the Democratic National Convention here in Philadelphia.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: And now: from a conservative Goldwater girl, to the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.

Tonight, we begin our series exploring Hillary Clinton’s life, starting with her entrance into politics.

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON (D), Presidential Candidate: It may be hard to see tonight, but we are all standing under a glass ceiling right now.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Almost half-a-century before Hillary Clinton became the first American woman to head up a major party’s presidential ticket, Hillary Rodham was making history as the first ever student to deliver a commencement address at Wellesley College in 1969.

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON: We feel that, for too long, our leaders have viewed politics as the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible.

REBECCA TRAISTER, Author, “All The Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation”: Buried in it is the blueprint for so much of what would come in the future for Hillary Clinton that I think still resonates today, when she’s on the verge of perhaps becoming the first woman president.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Author Rebecca Traister describes Clinton’s college years as a political transformation, from her roots in this conservative Chicago suburb.

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON: My father put everything he had into a small fabric printing shop in Chicago. My mother was out on her own working as a house maid at the age of 14. So, I grew up respecting the dignity of hard work.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Growing up, Rodham’s politics mirrored those of her father, a staunch Republican. As a college freshman, she served as president of the Young Republicans Club, but she graduated as a liberal Democrat, who would eventually work on George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign.

REBECCA TRAISTER: She became a young adult in this era in which the great social movements of the 20th century were totally reshaping the nation, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the gay rights movement. All of that was fomenting as she was coming to political consciousness.

JUDY WOODRUFF: After college came Yale Law School and work with the Children’s Defense Fund, where she knocked on doors, collecting data about poor children. It was the start of a long string of public service work, work that political reporter Indira Lakshmanan says motivates Clinton to this day.

INDIRA LAKSHMANAN, Journalist: She is driven by certain things that are important to her, the welfare of women and children, health care for all Americans, income inequality.

JUDY WOODRUFF: As Hillary was forming her ideas about public service, a fellow law student named Bill entered the picture.

REBECCA TRAISTER: He was from Arkansas, and he wanted to go back and start his political career. And so, in the early ’70s, Hillary Rodham had this choice: Does she embark on her own career, or does she go to Arkansas, where she doesn’t know anybody except for her boyfriend, and begin a career on her own as a lawyer, but really as a secondary figure to this man who is going to embark on what she thinks is destined to be a very serious and successful career in politics?

And, of course, we know she chooses to do the latter.

JUDY WOODRUFF: In October, 1975, Hillary Rodham married Bill Clinton at their home in Fayetteville, Arkansas. While Bill followed his political ambitions, getting elected Arkansas’ attorney general, Hillary supported the family by joining a Little Rock law firm, where she became their first female partner.

REBECCA TRAISTER: There was no clear-cut path for a woman to just walk into politics on her own coming out of law school. And part of what Hillary Clinton now says about that is, it just didn’t really occur to her or seem like something that made sense, that she wanted to participate in making policy, not as a headliner and not as a candidate herself, but as an advocate and kind of as a policy wonk.

JUDY WOODRUFF: When Bill was elected governor in 1979, Hillary took on an unofficial, but active role, says former White House aide David Gergen.

DAVID GERGEN, Former White House Aide: For a long, long time, even before she got to the White House, when the Clintons were in Arkansas and she was asked by her husband to take the lead on some various initiatives there, and she bravely went out and did that.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Indeed, Clinton appointed his wife to head up the Arkansas Education Standards Committee, where she worked to reform the state’s public schools, at a time when Arkansas was one of the lowest-performing states in the country.

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON: Because we’re going to give them every chance we can to develop their minds, so that they can play a role in this state, this country to make it the kind of place it needs to be!

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

JUDY WOODRUFF: By the end of his time as governor, Bill Clinton was praised for his education reforms, many of which came out of that committee, and public school performance had improved markedly.

INDIRA LAKSHMANAN: The Clintons’ argument has always been, even if unspoken, this sort of idea that you get a two-for-one deal with them. You get two people who are incredibly smart and well-educated and, again, whether you agree with their policies or not, are committed to certain policies and have been trying to work on those all their lives.

JUDY WOODRUFF: It was a theme Bill Clinton carried over to his run for the White House.

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON: If we want a president that brings out the best in us, then I think the choice is clear. It’s the next president of the United States Bill Clinton.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

JUDY WOODRUFF: But that working relationship, says Gergen, would take a toll on their marriage.

DAVID GERGEN: My sense was, they’d been so deeply involved in their public lives, that they — and there was so much going on, they really never settled what the rules of the road were when they came the White House. And it was volatile. It was a volatile relationship.

JUDY WOODRUFF: How volatile wasn’t visible to the outside world.

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GWEN IFILL: And we’re back to Philadelphia now, where the divisions within the Democratic Party are on full display tonight here in the Wells Fargo Arena.

To discuss all that, we are joined by two Minnesota lawmakers with differing perspectives.

Congressman Keith Ellison was an early Bernie Sanders supporter, but he threw his endorsement to Hillary Clinton earlier this month. And Senator Amy Klobuchar is a longtime Clinton backer.

Welcome to you both.

REP. KEITH ELLISON (D-Minn): Thank you for having us.

GWEN IFILL: I want to start with you, Congressman Ellison, because, later tonight, you will be introducing Bernie Sanders, and you have been in the room with us tonight and heard the booing which has greeted every mention of Hillary Clinton’s name.

Bernie Sanders has said to his people, calm down, and it hasn’t worked.

REP. KEITH ELLISON: Well, you know, people’s passions are running high. A lot of folks campaigned really hard for Bernie, and they put all they had into it.

But, you know, Bernie has said that we have fought the good fight. We have made the platform as progressive as it ever has been. We have made real progress. And we have really started a grassroots movement here. And it’s time to make sure that we come behind Hillary Clinton to defeat Donald Trump.

And I personally will say to you that Hillary Clinton has done progressive things and has a record to stand on, State Children’s Health Insurance Programs. She helped get eight million kids health insurance who didn’t have it. She started her legal career out at the Children’s Defense Fund.

GWEN IFILL: Why are they booing, then?

REP. KEITH ELLISON: Because they’re adjusting. Because they’re coming around. They have their own, you know, strong feelings about it, and they have invested their heart and soul into Bernie’s campaign.

But I believe that, with time, we will be very, very tight. I think we already have substantial unity already.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Senator Klobuchar, do you think Senator Sanders should have moved earlier to try to tamp down some of these feelings among his supporters, number one? And, number two, how much is it hurting Secretary Clinton to have the spectacle?

SEN. AMY KLOBUCHAR (D-Minn): Well, I have said from the beginning, I don’t think it’s time. It’s more important in what he said. And he gave an emphatic endorsement of her a few weeks ago.

And he also, as Keith noted, is going to come on tonight. Keith is going to be introducing him. I can’t think of a better person to introduce him than Keith Ellison.

And when you look at today, it was a wild day, that’s true, but look at the facts here. The Sanders people were very concerned about Debbie Wasserman Schultz. She stepped down as chair. She is not even going to be gaveling — didn’t gavel the convention.

(CROSSTALK)

SEN. AMY KLOBUCHAR: You have Bernie making his speech tonight. I think, given everything that happened, she took responsibility. She said — got us through the 2012 election, did an incredible job as chair, but given everything that’s happened, she decided to take responsibility for what happened.

But, to move on, you have got Bernie speaking tonight, you have got Elizabeth Warren, you have Michelle Obama. Really, the convention starts tonight.

GWEN IFILL: It seems like it takes more than speakers, however, for true unity to happen at a convention. We just spent a week in Cleveland, where the theme was a lack of unity. And how do you know that is not going to be — how do you prevent that from being the same theme in Philadelphia?

REP. KEITH ELLISON: Because I know that everybody who supported Bernie Sanders supported him because they believe that college debt is too high. They believe that the minimum wage needs to be increased. They believe that we have to take on climate action.

And so how can a real Bernie Sanders supporter ever do something that would help Donald Trump, who is opposed to all of those things? Now, people have — people — you can’t always just turn on a dime. I mean, if you put everything, your heart and soul into a campaign, it might take you a while to come around to the realization that, you know, another person has won.

But the fact is, I have faith in these folks. They are going to come around.

SEN. AMY KLOBUCHAR: And, if I could add, Ted Cruz, think of that speech. How did he end up? He ended up without even endorsing their candidate for president.

That’s not happening tonight with Bernie Sanders. And along the points Keith made, think about it. Climate change, what does Donald Trump say? He says it’s made up by the Chinese. What does Donald Trump say about the housing crisis? He says he wants to bet on it. What does he say about free college, one of the Bernie Sanders supporters’ key platform item? He says he wants to do Donald Trump University.

There is a vast difference.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But we’re here in Philadelphia, where we’re still seeing dissent, disagreement along the two sides. And to both of you, the fact is, Bernie Sanders supporters have strong feelings, strong expectations that are not going to be the priority for Secretary Clinton, when it comes to how far they want to go on the minimum wage, what they want to do on the environment.

REP. KEITH ELLISON: Well, there I have to say, you know, the platform is one of the most progressive platforms we have ever seen. And it wouldn’t be without the cooperation and endorsement of Hillary Clinton.

I mean, $15 minimum wage, the federal minimum wage, is in the platform. Debt-free college is in the platform.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But do you expect that she is going to make that a priority?

REP. KEITH ELLISON: I think that she is going to make it a big deal. That’s what people all over the stump are saying.

Look, Hillary Clinton has been fighting for these things her whole life. When has Hillary Clinton been about anything other than trying to make working people have a better lifestyle? That’s what her whole Senate and prior career were about.

So, look, I was a Bernie supporter. I was proud to be that. I’m now proud to support Hillary Clinton, because I believe that we do have shared values, and the evidence of it is the platform. The platform is the most progressive we have ever seen.

GWEN IFILL: I’m old enough to remember when the secret of the sauce for Democrats was supposed to be moving to the middle, moving and becoming more moderate. I believe it may have been Hillary Clinton’s husband who spearheaded this idea.

So now are we, looking at this — what the pressure, the most progressive platform ever, as Keith Ellison puts it, are we now a Democratic — are you now a Democratic Party moving more and more to the left?

SEN. AMY KLOBUCHAR: I think what Keith is talking about with this platform is, times change, and right now what people need is, they need to be able to send their kids to college, they need to able to buy a house.

And the platform simply reflects where we are as a country, and the fact that we have seen this enormous income inequality that both of our candidates have been talking about from the beginning that you don’t hear from the Republican side, where all you hear from them is divide, divide, divide.

And Bernie Sanders’ speech, you compare it to Ted Cruz’s at the end of the day, and you won’t even see the same points or see the same ending.

(CROSSTALK)

JUDY WOODRUFF: But to come back to the point we were all discussing a few minutes ago, isn’t there an impatience, not only among the Bernie Sanders supporters, but among other Americans, to see change, and it’s hard for them to see that with Secretary Clinton, who’s been on the American political scene for two or three decades?

REP. KEITH ELLISON: Sometimes, this is what democracy looks like. People’s passions run strong.

They’re dealing with really tough things all across America. You’re dealing with low wages. They can’t send their kids to school. Of course they’re going to come in here and demand change. And they’re not just going to sit quiet as their economic situation at home is not making the improvements at the pace that they need them to.

So I’m not really too worried about the level of enthusiasm and passion that we see on the House floor. I think that…

(CROSSTALK)

GWEN IFILL: The House floor.

REP. KEITH ELLISON: You know what?

(LAUGHTER)

REP. KEITH ELLISON: You know, I spend a lot of time…

(CROSSTALK)

JUDY WOODRUFF: You’re forgiven. You’re forgiven.

(LAUGHTER)

REP. KEITH ELLISON: I spend a lot of time there.

But I think that we’re going to see passion. This is what democracy looks like. This is what people do in America. They get out. They demonstrate. They let their voices with heard. But we will be together.

GWEN IFILL: Final thoughts, Senator Klobuchar?

SEN. AMY KLOBUCHAR: Well, just to your original point here about some of the independent voters as well, I know a lot of people in our state who can — we elected Jesse Ventura. Right?

They don’t want to have a candidate that feels temperamentally unsure. They don’t want to have someone that is going to bring them into a war zone again. There’s a lot of things that bring independent voters to Hillary Clinton. And our job this week, without a doubt, is to tell that story, to tell the personal stories about her and also to tell about her vision for America, because we didn’t hear about that last week. All we heard was negativity.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, we have got four whole nights to go. We’re just getting started.

REP. KEITH ELLISON: Getting started.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Two lawmakers.

SEN. AMY KLOBUCHAR: You get to watch us announce the delegates together.

REP. KEITH ELLISON: There you go.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Two lawmakers from Minnesota, Senator Amy Klobuchar, Representative Keith Ellison, thanks to you both.

REP. KEITH ELLISON: Thanks a lot.

SEN. AMY KLOBUCHAR: Thank you.

GWEN IFILL: Thank you.

The post Can Hillary Clinton win over the Bernie Sanders booers? appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Let’s dig into now to the details of that DNC hack we were talking about and the motivation behind it.

Hari Sreenivasan is in Washington with that story.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Thanks, Judy.

For that, I spoke earlier this evening with former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul. He’s now a professor at Stanford University. And Thomas Rid, who joins us via Skype from Austria. He is a professor at King’s College London. He has written extensively about cyber-attacks and digital security, most recently in his book “The Rise of the Machines.”

Gentlemen, thanks for joining us.

THOMAS RID, King’s College London: Hi.

MICHAEL MCFAUL, Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia: Great to be here.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Thomas, I want to start with you.

First, lay out the evidence for us. We have heard that this is the Russian government. How do we know that this was Russia? How do we know that this is a sophisticated act that might take a state actor?

THOMAS RID: So, there are two bits of the evidence.

The first is, who hacked the DNC? The second is, who gave the e-mails to WikiLeaks? On the first stage, who hacked the DNC, imagine a burglary, and you find the fingerprints in a house, and then you find the same in another house, and you know who breached in one house, but not the other.

That’s a bit the situation that we’re having here. So, we have I.P. addresses. We have server infrastructure. We have SSL certificates, so quite strong evidence to say that the DNC was actually hacked by groups that are associated with Russia.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Well, Michael McFaul, are you convinced that it was Russia? Is this the way that they operate?

MICHAEL MCFAUL: Well, first, more generally, Russia has tremendous capability in this domain.

I worked in the government for five years. I witnessed it. I saw it. And we should all just say that first. Second, the reports that we have, just like Thomas just said, are very suggestive that it was two different Russian entities. The organization, the company that investigated it, CrowdStrike, was rather definitive in their analysis that they published a month ago, by the way, not just a few days ago.

And now today, we have many senior U.S. government officials also confirming that they have strong suspicions that it was these Russian entities.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Mr. Rid, I want to ask, is this consistent with previous hacks that the Russian government might have orchestrated?

Does this fall within their definition of what is allowed within how they carry out cyber-warfare?

THOMAS RID: So, the Russian government and intelligence community have been hacking and breaching adversary computer networks for a very long time, literally for 20 years this year.

But this is the first time they have breached a system and didn’t just exfiltrate, take out data, but then started putting those files into the public domain in order to affect, in this case, a Democratic election campaign. That’s new. That’s a game-changer, I think.

So, stealing, yes, but dumping into the public domain, that, we haven’t seen before.

Can I just add a bit of international perspective here? We have the same entity that was caught in the DNC’s networks was also caught in the German Parliament, in the Bundestag, in May 2015. The same entity was caught in a French TV station and actually just interrupted their programming around the same time.

It was caught in other European military networks. And the attribution was actually quite strong in those cases. The German government has come out publicly and pointed the finger at Russian military intelligence.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Michael McFaul, why would Russia want to do this? What are their interests in publicizing this intel, if they were in fact the ones that acquired it in the first place?

MICHAEL MCFAUL: I think there are two different kinds of arguments to think about here.

One is the policy argument. There’s no question in my mind that the Kremlin, President Putin and others have said this rather clearly, in my view, that they prefer Trump to Clinton, in terms of his policies. He said things that they like.

But there is another element that I don’t think has gotten as much attention, and that is that this is also personal. If you go back and you look at what Vladimir Putin and others said back during their last electoral round, they criticized Secretary Clinton personally for what they alleged was her meddling in their internal affairs.

She criticized a parliamentary election back in December 2011. She said it wasn’t free or fair, or had problems. I don’t remember the exact statement. And Putin then said she incited — I think the word he used, gave the protesters a signal to come out and protest against him. So Putin’s a guy that remembers these things. Maybe that’s another explanation for why they’re seeking this tit for tat now.

HARI SREENIVASAN: I want to pick on something you said a little earlier, is that this sort of intelligence tradecraft happens all the time, that we are probably participating in some of it some country somewhere. Is the difference then that it’s happening to the United States?

MICHAEL MCFAUL: No, I would put it somewhat differently.

Let’s be candid here. Do we really believe the DNC is the only organization in the United States that the Russians have hacked? No, I don’t believe that. They have an active operation here where they’re constantly seeking to gather intelligence.

What’s unique about this is that they were caught and that they were exposed, and, number two, the data dump. I mean, that’s the thing that is really striking to me. And that it was released on the day before the opening of the Democratic National Convention, that’s not just coincidence.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Thomas Rid?

THOMAS RID: I think it’s really time for the United States government and the intelligence community in the U.S. to pull its weight and also draw a line here, because, indeed, as Michael McFaul said, this is a very significant incident.

A lot of countries in Europe are looking at this and thinking, oh, my God, if they get away with doing this to the Americans, what are going to they do to us?

HARI SREENIVASAN: All right, Thomas Rid, author of “Rise of the Machines,” Michael McFaul, former ambassador to Russia, thank you both for joining us.

MICHAEL MCFAUL: Thank you.

THOMAS RID: Thank you.

GWEN IFILL: Thanks, Hari for that conversation.

The post Was Putin’s bad blood with Clinton behind DNC hacking? appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: The Democratic National Convention has opened for business, amid a new burst of discord. Calls for unity from Hillary Clinton’s camp are competing with cries of foul from backers of Bernie Sanders.

Correspondent John Yang begins our coverage here in Philadelphia.

JOHN YANG: The divisions were on display right from the start, when Baltimore Mayor Sterling gaveled the convention into session.

It was to have been Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. But a firestorm erupted among Sanders supporters after WikiLeaks posted DNC e-mails that showed party officials criticizing and even mocking the Sanders campaign during the primaries.

WOMAN: You don’t care about half the party.

JOHN YANG: This morning, the Florida congresswoman got a tumultuous welcome from her own home delegation’s breakfast.

REP. DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ, Chair, Democratic National Committee: We have so much to do and we have to make sure that we move forward in a unified way. We know that the voices in this room that are standing up and being disruptive, we know that is not the Florida we know.

JOHN YANG: Wasserman Schultz had already announced her resignation as party chairman at the end of the convention. Some Sanders supporters say it’s not enough.

MAN: We want to actually unite the party. All we are asking for is for the person who resigned in disgrace to leave the room.

MAN: I’m very upset because I think that Bernie, if not has tied, may have actually won this election, if he had been treated fairly.

JOHN YANG: The embattled congresswoman is already facing a tough primary challenge from law professor Tim Canova, who’s being backed by Sanders. Addressing supporters, Sanders urged party unity, and got booed himself.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (VT-I), Presidential Candidate: We have got to defeat Donald Trump.

(APPLAUSE)

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: And we have got to elect Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine.

(BOOING)

JOHN YANG: He says the e-mail leaks won’t change his endorsement of Clinton, it remains to be seen what is delegates do.

In the streets of Philadelphia, thousands of Sanders supporters braved the blistering heat to vent their anger.

WOMAN: I’m not a Republican, but I have to agree with Ted Cruz. We have to vote our conscience. We can’t vote the way we’re told.

JOHN YANG: As this convention’s business gets under way, the DNC has issued a deep and sincere policy to Sanders and his supporters. Sanders will be the featured speaker here tonight, appearing after Michelle Obama and Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Clinton campaign officials say they hope this uproar will be long forgotten by week’s end and that the gathering will live up to its theme of united together.

Meanwhile, the FBI is investigating how the thousands of DNC e-mails found their way to WikiLeaks. Clinton’s campaign manager Robby Mook suggests it’s the work of Russian hackers hoping to give Republican Donald Trump a boost. Trump calls that claim a joke. He campaigned today in Roanoke, Virginia.

DONALD TRUMP (R), Presidential Nominee: Hillary Clinton knew what was going on. She knew everything that was going on. She knew it’s a rigged system, that Bernie Sanders never had a chance, OK? He never had a chance.

And if you look at it, look what’s going on. They’re having a lot of people marching. Now, a lot of those people are going to vote for us.

JOHN YANG: Today, Hillary Clinton also got the endorsement of retired U.S. Marine General John Allen, once the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan.

In a statement, he said: “I have no doubt that she is the leader we need at this time to keep our country safe, and I trust her with that most sacred responsibility of commander in chief.”

Clinton picked up that theme at the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON (D), Presumptive presidential nominee: You will never hear me say that I only listen to myself on national security. I will be ready to get to work on day one. I take nothing more seriously than our security.

JOHN YANG: Trump is to address the same gathering tomorrow.

In Philadelphia, the 5,000 delegates have gathered under tight security along with an estimated 45,000 journalists, activists and observers.

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m John Yang in Philadelphia.

GWEN IFILL: Later this afternoon, Senator Sanders sent out e-mails and text messages urging supporters not to boo or to stage walkouts.

We head down to the convention floor now with NPR’s “Weekend Edition Sunday” host Rachel Martin, who joins us tonight and every night this week as part of our joint “PBS NewsHour” and NPR convention coverage.

Rachel, it doesn’t seem like Bernie Sanders’ plea worked.

RACHEL MARTIN: Yes, Gwen, that’s right.

You heard it there in John’s piece. There is real discord in the Democratic Party right now. After Cleveland, after the Republican National Convention, Hillary Clinton and her campaign had to deal with all the personal attacks on her. They were hoping that this would be a very different moment, that this would be a moment when the so-called Democratic family would come together, wrap her up in all kinds of love and support.

This is not the case, at least not thus on day one of the convention. There has been all kind of booing. Every time someone takes the stage and says it’s time to come together and for all of us to get behind the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, there is audible booing in this auditorium, even when Bernie supporters come up and say that.

Ben Jealous, the head of the NAACP, strong Bernie Sanders supporter, when he got up, he got booed. As John mentioned in his piece, Bernie Sanders himself was booed as a breakfast earlier today. So, this is going to be the challenge of people who come to the podium today to try to deliver a message that makes those Bernie Sanders voters feel enfranchised, feel that they are a part of this party and that their issues are being considered really at the heart of the Democratic platform.

We will hear, of course, from Bernie Sanders himself, also Elizabeth Warren, a key leader in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and then Michelle Obama, the first lady, who has sky-high favorable ratings. They’re hoping that she can kind of bring everyone together in this moment — back to you, Gwen and Judy.

JUDY WOODRUFF: All right, Rachel Martin down at the podium, thanks very much.

The post Calls for unity compete with cries of foul at Democratic convention appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., takes the stage during the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on July 25, 2016. Photo by Gary Cameron/Reuters

PHILADELPHIA — Ending months of animosity, Bernie Sanders robustly embraced his former rival Hillary Clinton Monday night as a champion for the same economic causes that enlivened his supporters, signaling it was time for them, too, to rally behind the Democratic nominee in the campaign against Republican Donald Trump.

“Any objective observer will conclude that — based on her ideas and her leadership — Hillary Clinton must become the next president of the United States,” he declared in a headlining address on the opening night of the Democratic convention.

President Bill Clinton, watching from the audience, leapt to his feet and applauded, as did most of the delegates filling the convention arena.

Sanders joined a high-wattage line-up of speakers, including first lady Michelle Obama who delivered a forceful, impassioned defense of the Democratic nominee. Mrs. Obama’s address all but wiped away earlier tumult in the convention hall that had exposed lingering tensions between Clinton and Sanders supporters.

“I want someone with the proven strength to persevere, someone who knows this job and takes it seriously, someone who understands the issues a president faces are not black and white,” Mrs. Obama said. Referring to Trump’s penchant for tweeting, she said of the presidency: “It cannot be boiled down to 140 characters.”

While Sanders had endorsed Clinton previously, his remarks Monday marked his most vigorous and detailed praise of her qualifications for the presidency. It came at a crucial moment for Clinton’s campaign, on the heels of leaked emails suggesting the party had favored the former secretary of state through the primaries despite a vow of neutrality.

Sanders scored the resignation of party chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a nemesis in the primaries, but that wasn’t enough to quell the anger of supporters. As the convention opened, they still erupted in chants of “Bernie” and booed Clinton the first several times her name was mentioned. Outside the convention hall, several hundred marched down Philadelphia’s sweltering streets with signs carrying messages such as “Never Hillary.”

By the time Sanders took the stage for the night’s closing address, much of the anger had been overshadowed by speeches promoting party unity. Sanders did his part, imploring his supporters to consider a country under Trump’s leadership.

“If you don’t believe this election is important, if you think you can sit it out, take a moment to think about the Supreme Court justices that Donald Trump would nominate and what that would mean to civil liberties, equal rights and the future of our country,” he said.

Sanders spoke just after Massachusetts. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a favorite of liberals who has emerged as one of the Democrats’ toughest critics of Trump.

“Donald Trump has no real plans for jobs, for college kids, for seniors,” she said in the keynote address. “No plans to make anything great for anyone except rich guys like Donald Trump.”

Mrs. Obama was one of the night’s standouts. While she has often avoided overt politics during her nearly eight years in the White House, her frustration with Trump’s rise was evident. She warned that the White House couldn’t be in the hands of someone with “a thin skin or a tendency to lash out” or someone who tells voters the country can be great again.

“This right now, is the greatest country on earth,” she said.

Clinton’s campaign hoped the nighttime line-up would overshadow a tumultuous start to the four-day convention. The hacked DNC emails fed the suspicion of Sanders’ supporters and sapped Clinton’s campaign of some of its energy following a well-received rollout Saturday of her running mate, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine.

Campaigning in North Carolina, Trump seemed to revel in the Democrats’ commotion, telling supporters that Clinton made a mistake by not choosing a more liberal running mate to appease Sanders’ base. “Crazy Bernie’s going crazy right now,” he said.

But in Philadelphia, Delegates waved “Love Trumps Hate” signs and cheered as immigration supporters, gay rights advocates, and labor leaders took the stage.

Sen. Al Franken from Minnesota and comedian Sarah Silverman speak about Hillary Clinton and party unity. Photo by Mark Kauzlarich/Reuters

Comedian-turned-Sen. Al Franken, a Clinton supporter, and actress Sarah Silverman, a Sanders supporter, made a joint appearance to promote party unity.

“I am proud to be part of Bernie’s movement,” Silverman said as the crowd roared. “And a vital part of that movement is making absolutely sure Hillary Clinton is our next president of the United States.”

Trump was a frequent target throughout the night, though the jabs were often more mocking than mean. The tone was a sharp contrast to the Republican convention, where the attacks against Clinton was bitingly personal, including chants of “Lock her up.”

Wasserman Schultz had planned to be among those taking the stage, despite the email hacking controversy. But she stepped aside, bowing to pressure from Democrats who feared the mere sight of her on stage would prompt strong opposition.

The outgoing chairwoman did watch the gathering from a private suite at the arena.

Discussions between the Clinton and Sanders camps prompted him to send emails and text messages to supporters asking them not to protest.

“Our credibility as a movement will be damaged by booing, turning of backs, walking out or other similar displays,” Sanders wrote.

___

Associated Press writers Kathleen Hennessey, Catherine Lucey, Kathleen Ronayne and Julie Bykowicz in Philadelphia, Lisa Lerer in Charlotte, North Carolina, contributed to this report.

The post After turmoil, Bernie Sanders, Michelle Obama and Elizabeth Warren thrill convention appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Judith Barrington is the author of four collections of poetry.

Three and a half years ago, Judith Barrington went to the hospital for what she thought was a severe migraine. Instead, doctors discovered a subdural hematoma— a collection of blood outside her brain. Later they would tell her she had been about three hours away from death.

“It was very traumatic, when you experience something like this completely out of the blue. It was just so shocking and life altering.”

After surgery to release the pressure, Barrington remained hospitalized for another month of rehabilitation. After returning home, she began to write poems about the experience, including “The Wound.” She was inspired to write it after discovering a quote about light written by the 13th century poet, scholar and mystic Rumi.

“For awhile after this experience I saw things in a way I hadn’t before. I felt appreciative of light. One of my hospital rooms had a big window and I could see trees and mountains in the distance. I couldn’t do anything— read or listen to the radio — so I would just look out the window. And I really did notice things in a more observant way than I had before.”

Many of these poems became part of a collection called “The Conversation,” which was published last year. In addition to dealing with issues of mortality and her recent medical crisis, the poems look back to her childhood memories and to the tragic death of her parents who drowned on a cruise ship when she was 19 years old.

“When anything impacts me emotionally or spiritually or intellectually, my immediate response is to put it into words, to capture it — which of course no one can do. The written account is always a sad shadow of the real thing. But I’ve always tried to record these experiences, to keep track of my life in words.”

Read next: Of black shootings by police, poet asks: When will it stop?

“The Conversation” also includes poems about love and gay marriage. Barrington has been with her partner for 37 years, but until recently didn’t think much about gay marriage.

“We’re old feminists and we were kind of indoctrinated with the idea that the institution of marriage was bad for everybody. But a lot of people put a lot of work into fighting for this so we thought we should show some solidarity and get married ourselves.”

In addition to her poetry, Barrington has written a memoir and a textbook about writing memoirs. A collection of new and selected poems is scheduled to be published next year.

THE WOUND

The wound is the place where the light enters you
–RUMI

A small man with curly hair and a French accent
sliced my skull on the right side, vertically, opened
a flap by which the irritating blood could leave my brain
and then closed it up again with screws and a line of staples
that I still have—forty two of them in a plastic bag.

Did the light enter me there?
Is my head full of light now
or has it spread all through my body,
white light filling me
all the way to the tips of my fingers and toes.

And what exactly is this new light that slipped in
through the open flap while the surgeon’s delicate fingers
held his instruments poised, pressed bone and skin into place
and closed up until inside that sudden opening
everything grew dark again?

The light of seeing how snow
and starched blue sky waited outside
my window until I really saw them;
behind the trees, darkness
forever touched by the kindness of light;
and the shine of time passing at the speed
it likes to pass, none of it wasted—
even when I couldn’t find the words.

Judith Barrington was born in Brighton, England, in 1944 and moved to Portland, Oregon, in 1976. She has published four collections of poetry which include “The Conversation”, “Horses and the Human Soul”, “History and Geography” and “Trying to be an Honest Woman.” She is the author of “Lifesaving: A Memoir”, which was the winner of the Lambda Book Award. She also wrote the textbook “Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art”, now in its 12th printing.

Barrington has taught creative writing at the University of Alaska and at many workshops including the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, Haystack, Split Rock, Fishtrap and the Ashland Writing Conference.

The post A poet sees the light after the darkness of illness appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

A student walks through the University of Texas campus in Austin, Texas, the site of a 1966 mass shooting that left 17 dead and more than 45 wounded. Photo by Jon Herskovitz/Reuters

The clock on the iconic tower at the University of Texas stopped at 11:48 a.m. Monday, marking the exact time 50 years ago when a man began firing from atop the Austin landmark, killing 14 on campus. One of the victims was the unborn child of a woman who was shot. Another victim was injured at the time but died decades later from the wounds.

“Before we can see properly, we must first shed our tears to clear the way,” UT Austin President Greg Fenves said during a memorial service honoring the more than 45 people shot on the morning of Aug. 1, 1966.

The service included a dedication of a memorial stone for the 16 people and an 8-month-old fetus killed by Charles Whitman, a 25-year-old Marine-trained sniper, who was gunned by police about an hour and a half after the carnage began. Prior to ascending the tower, Whitman had killed his wife and mother.

“It’s not the stone we dedicate, but ourselves,” shooting survivor Claire James said, adding that the stone will be “reassuring and comforting” to those who visit.

A stone memorial to the 16 people and one fetus who died in the August 1, 1966, mass shooting is seen ahead of it being officially delegated at a ceremony that marks the 50th anniversary of the killing at the University of Texas in Austin. Photo by Jon Herskovitz/Reuters

Monday also marked the day a new Texas law went into effect, allowing people with concealed carry permits to bring their handguns onto the campuses of Texas public universities, including classrooms and student unions.

Universities are also authorized to establish rules and regulations regarding the storing and carrying of handguns in certain areas on campus. For example, the law bans guns from sports arenas, research labs that house dangerous chemicals, and, depending on the school, dormitories.

Open carrying is also still prohibited on campuses.

J.B. Bird, a university spokesman, has called the convergence of the new law and the anniversary of the 1966 shooting “unfortunate timing.”

“These two events are completely unrelated, and we’re keeping them completely separate,” Bird said.

Three UT Austin professors sued the school and the state in July in an attempt to halt the law from taking effect. The professors said allowing guns in the classroom would stifle free speech by intimidation.

Private universities can still ban guns under state law. To date, Amberton University has been the only private school to adopt the new measure.

Community colleges have until August 1, 2017 to comply.

Texas is now the eighth state to permit those with concealed carry licenses to bring their handguns on university grounds, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The organization, Students for Concealed Carry, said in a statement that no one in the Texas Legislature intended for the campus carry law to coincide with the anniversary of the mass shooting.

“We’ll have many years to celebrate the legalization of campus carry,” the organization said. “For one day, Texas can focus on the 17 lives lost and countless lives affected by the tragedy 50 years ago.”

The post 50 years after UT Austin clock tower shooting, new campus carry gun law goes into effect appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

According to a new survey, 62 percent of survey respondents support making public colleges and universities tuition free. Photo by Hero Images/Getty Images

Despite the rising price of higher education, many college graduates still believe a college degree is worth the cost.

According to a Bankrate survey released Monday, 89 percent of four-year college grads believe that their degree was a good investment.

READ MORE: Student debt hurts household wealth for decades

Age was a major factor in the responses. Approximately 21 percent of younger millennials, who attended a four-year college, said college was not worth the cost, which was more than any other age group. Of college graduates 65 or older, however, 97 percent said it was a good investment.

The survey also touched on free college tuition, an issue that has been raised in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has proposed free tuition at public colleges and universities for students whose families have an annual income below $125,000 by 2021. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has not released any official plan to deal with the issue of increasing college costs, although he recently said he plans to do so in the coming weeks.

READ MORE: In overture to Sanders, Clinton unveils college costs plan

A majority — 62 percent of survey respondents — favor making public colleges and universities tuition free.

But, as might be expected, the numbers do break down party lines. According to the survey, 81 percent of respondents who identify as Democrats said they support free tuition for public colleges and universities. About 67 percent of respondents who identify as independent are also in favor, while only 33 percent of Republicans support the idea.

The post Most grads say college is a worthy investment, but support making college tuition free appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

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Donald Trump should show more “patience and tolerance” for criticism, according to Khizr Khan, the father of a slain U.S. soldier who has come under attack from Trump after rebuking the Republican nominee at the Democratic National Convention last week.

In an interview on Monday with PBS NewsHour, Khan accused Trump of responding poorly to criticism on the campaign trail, though the real estate developer often lashes out at his opponents.

“In his eyes, he thinks that he can criticize people but no one else can criticize” him, Khan told PBS NewsHour co-anchor Judy Woodruff in a joint interview with his wife, Ghazala Khan.

“That is not the value of this country,” added Khan, a Muslim- American attorney who immigrated with his wife and son to the U.S. from Pakistan.

Khan was responding to several comments Trump made over the weekend and on Monday about Khan’s speech at the DNC, in which he argued that Trump was unfit to be president.

“Mr. Khan, who does not know me, viciously attacked me from the stage of the DNC and is now all over T.V. doing the same – Nice!” Trump said in one message on Twitter.

Trump also questioned why Ghazala Khan appeared silently on stage as her husband spoke at the convention, and criticized the media for focusing attention on the Khan family instead of on the threat of terrorism.

Republican leaders quickly condemned Trump’s comments. Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, who is facing a difficult re-election this fall, said she was “appalled” by Trump’s words.

Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who is also in a tough reelection battle and was attacked by Trump for his military service last year, issued a statement on Monday condemning Trump’s remarks.

“In recent days, Donald Trump disparaged a fallen soldier’s family,” McCain said. He added, “while our party has bestowed upon him the nomination, it is not accompanied by unfettered license to defame those who are the best among us.”

In the PBS NewsHour interview, Ghazala Khan — who has said she chose not to speak at the DNC out of grief over her son’s death — criticized Trump’s proposal to ban Muslim immigrants from entering the United States, saying that Trump “doesn’t know Islam.”

“We should respect each other whatever our beliefs are,” she added.

Khizr Khan also explained why he decided to pull out a small copy of the U.S. constitution during his convention speech. Khan memorably asked Trump if he had ever read it, and offered to lend the real estate mogul his copy.

“That was the reason to bring out the constitution, to show him that we are all equal under the eyes of the creator and this country,” Khan said.

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