Good morning. After a long July, it is the first of August. It's hot again in New York City, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. Bloomberg this morning broke the news that Evan Gershkovich of the Wall Street Journal, former Marine Paul Whelan, and the dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza are being released from Russian imprisonment as part of a U .S.-Russia prisoner swap. Gershkovich had been sentenced to 16 years imprisonment last month on espionage charges after more than a year's detention awaiting trial. 

The New York Times is reporting online that the assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran for the Iranian presidential inauguration was done with a remote -controlled bomb that had been smuggled into a government -run guest house some two months earlier. That news is credited to seven Middle Eastern officials, including two Iranians and an American official. The assassination also remains the lead story on the front of the paper, New York Times. "Iran vows to seek revenge in death of Hamas leader." A two-column headline over two separate columns. On the right, the news story, "Israel remains silent on assassination, but stands firm." And on the left news analysis, "twin attacks imperil tense equilibrium." Anaya's killing, and the airstrike against a Hezbollah commander in Beirut right before it, were viewed, the analysis story writes, "as a particularly provocative escalation that has left the region fearing an even bigger response from Iran and its regional proxies, including Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, and militias in Iraq." If you're looking for encouraging news, still, while Iran and Hezbollah are likely to respond, Times writes, "they may yet choose methods that give Israel room to avoid further retaliation, at least for now," some analysts said.

Assuming that is that Benjamin Netanyahu wants to avoid further retaliation, rather than his ongoing campaign to keep waging war to avoid being sent to prison for his various crimes has reached some point of diminishing returns in chasing the civilians of Gaza back and forth between ever more pulverized piles of rubble and now requires fresh combat somewhere else. 

Elsewhere on page one is a write -up of Donald Trump's appearance at the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists, which the Times managed to put under the headline, "At Journalists' Meeting, Trump Questions Harris's Race Identity." Someone must have thought this was a safe application of the Times's habit of glossing every controversy as a matter of questioning. When in fact Trump did not question Kamala Harris's identity, he made disparaging false statements about it, which the story does quote and contextualize, "she was Indian all the way and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a black person, he said of Ms. Harris, whose mother was Indian American, whose father is black, and who has always identified as a black woman." Not a bad summation, but why save the word insulted to describe it until after the jump? The weird softening urge crops up again later on. For Mr. Trump, the Times writes, "it was an opportunity to stake his claim to black voters that he's insisted he can attract, but it was not clear that he succeeded. Instead, he disparaged the vice president in clearly racial terms and declined to say whether she had achieved her position based on merit or based on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs." By clearly racial terms, they mean racist terms. Somehow, one of the three bylines on the piece is that of Jonathan Weisman. That's right, the guy who got demoted for tweeting that John Lewis wasn't really a Southerner. If I had more than 2,000 newsroom employees to choose from, I would probably just pick someone else to write about racist discourse in politics, but I am not the New York Times. 

Down below the fold, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other 9 -11 defendants entered guilty pleas to 2,976 murders and other charges in a deal that gets them life sentences, avoiding on their side the risk of the death penalty at trial, and on the government's side, the potential disaster of a public reckoning with just how much of the evidence against them would be inadmissible under any normal standards of criminal justice, thanks to the government's unrestrained use of torture against them. 

Next to that is a look at how traffic stops declined during the pandemic and traffic fatalities rose, a story that wants to be about the perversity of conflicting incentives as the critics of brutal, lethal, and racist policing had identified and criticized traffic stops as a central source of police violence. On examination, it seems more like the problem is that police were always more interested in hassling people over a busted taillight or an expired registration than in punishing people for speeding or running out red lights or doing any of other stuff that police themselves love to do at the wheel. So when traffic stops came under criticism, the cops, being cops, pretended not to know or understand the difference and gave up on traffic safety enforcement to own the libs. The police have that kind of discretion because, as the story eventually gets around to noting, "many peer European and Asian countries have reduced fatalities by designing roads that discourage speeding and protect pedestrians and cyclists while deploying cameras more widely. The US, in essence, uses the police to make up for not doing those things. And over time, that enforcement has become increasingly inseparable from fighting crime with many stops serving no road safety outcome."

It's not clear that the pre-textual stops are very good crime fighting measures either, but they're the chance for cops to do the cop stuff that makes them feel like cops. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. And if all goes well, we will talk again tomorrow.