When Cori Bush says she is the people she represents, it's not a campaign slogan.

Cori Bush is a former early childhood educator, a community-based mental health registered nurse, and an ordained pastor. She is a single mother and a community activist and organizer.

Cori has felt the burden of being uninsured and the pain of homelessness. She has endured racism and sexism. She is a survivor of sexual assault and domestic violence. Cori experienced the challenges of raising children on her own, living paycheck to paycheck, making just above minimum wage, taking on student loans to continue her education.

And Cori Bush stands tall, using her experiences as fuel to fight for the disadvantaged, the disenfranchised, and the voiceless.

Cori is a tireless advocate for creating dramatic change. Now is not the time for baby steps. Incremental change is no change at all when her patients can’t afford medication, and families are struggling to put food on the table and find justice in the streets.

A native of St. Louis, Cori Bush is running to bring transformative change to Missouri’s 1st Congressional District. Stand with Cori, because she stands with you.

The father of two Parkland school shooting survivors was fatally shot at his own North Lauderdale convenience store during a robbery, according to the Broward County Sheriff's Office.

Ayub Ali, a father of four, died Tuesday. Just five months prior, his son and daughter survived the mass shooting that killed 17 and injured 17 others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

According to a BSO report, Lauderdale Lakes BSO deputies and Tamarac Fire Rescue paramedics found the injured 61-year-old store clerk when they arrived at Aunt Molly's Food Store, located at 1691 S. State Road. Ali was transported to Fort Lauderdale's Broward Health Medical Center where he was pronounced dead.

The suspect forced Ali to his store's back office, where he was shot.

"I don't think that the game of football, that it's been proven that the game of football causes CTE," Fedora said. "But that's been put out there. We don't really know yet.

No, no, that's not what I meant," Fedora said. "How's the game under attack? To me, it's more about people twisting the data and the information out there to use for whatever their agenda is.

"Oh yes, I fear that the game will get pushed so far to one extreme that you won't recognize the game 10 years from now," Fedora said. "That's what I worry about. And I do believe if it gets to that point, that our country goes down, too."

The general Fedora talks about here isn’t the only person who thinks football ties into military dominance. Structurally, this sport lends itself to warfare comparisons:

Football gets likened to war because it’s a territorial struggle. Football plays are the distribution of players across open space. When you think of it like that, it makes sense. If you’re going to conquer the space — a football field — you should understand its constraints.

And America’s got an ongoing cultural tendency to attach football to war in all kinds of subliminal ways. We do this when we talk about “ground attacks” and “battles” and “flankers,” and even when we talk about teams getting the “territorial advantage.”

He [Fedora] ticked off a few things North Carolina’s done to promote player health, like monitoring head impact with helmet technology and having a concussions expert on hand.

“Again, I’m gonna say the game is safer than it’s ever been in the history of the game, but we will still continue to tweak the game as we go,” Fedora said.

It wasn’t clear if he thought those tweaks would bring about the end of American society as we know it.

Public awareness of global warming is up and support for action is broad, with eight in 10 Americans saying the federal government should try to achieve the same deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions called for in the international treaty rejected by Donald Trump.

Sixty-one percent in a new national survey also say the federal government should be doing “a great deal” or “a lot” about global warming, up 8 points since 2015 to the most since 2009. A mere 10 percent say the government in fact is doing that much – down 5 points in three years.

Mike DeWine (R-OH) has predicated a whole lot of his gubernatorial campaign on opposing the current Republican governor's embrace of Medicaid expansion. DeWine has said that "Medicaid expansion is financially unsustainable for both the federal government and for Ohio" and that if he wins, the expansion "will not exist as we know it." He's attacked his primary opponent Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor for supporting Gov. John Kasich's decision to expand it. But lately he's changed that tune.

On Wednesday afternoon, DeWine flatly said he would retain the entire Medicaid expansion while seeking reforms, imposing work requirements for recipients and instituting wellness programs to reduce costs.

DeWine said his announcement, made while accepting the endorsement of the political action committee of the Ohio State Medical Association, was not a reversal of his prior position.

How much did the state medical association's PAC have to do with that? Everything, as Democrat Richard Cordray emphasizes

Even more chilling for Republicans in terms of turnout is that Democrats, in the brief history of the open primary in the state, have turned out in far better proportions in the general elections than in the primary. In the 2014 primary, Democratic candidates (Brown had a nuisance challenger that notched less than 1 percent of the vote) comprised 55 percent of the primary vote, while the Republicans accounted for 40 percent of the primary vote. By the general election, though, Brown pushed the advantage out to 20 points, a five-point improvement over the primary.

Democrats already outpolled Republicans in the open primary in one vulnerable GOP-held U.S. House seat (CA-49, where Democratic candidates led GOP candidates 51-48 in the primary). If a five-point swing between primary and general elections can be replicated in 2018, that would put no less than three other districts on the block where the D/R split was less than that (CA-10, CA-25, and CA-45), and put two others (CA-39 and CA-48) right on the knife’s edge, based on the partisan splits in the primary.

Pot advocates celebrated the culmination of a yearslong effort to ease restrictions on the use of cannabis last month when nearly 60 percent of Oklahoma voters approved medical marijuana.

Oklahoma's proponents had even included a two-month deadline for the implementation in their measure so as to avoid the years of delays they had seen elsewhere.

But that has not stopped state health officials and the Republican governor from making drastic changes . Within weeks of the election, they signed off on tough new restrictions, including a ban on the sale of smokable pot. The change was supported by groups representing doctors, hospitals and pharmacists who opposed medical marijuana, but infuriated supporters of the state question and has already led to lawsuits.

"It's like they snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory," said Chip Paul, who helped write Oklahoma's medical marijuana state question and push for its approval. "You try to do something the proper way. You follow the rules. And then you win and you get screwed."

During a hearing on Capitol Hill Thursday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told angry lawmakers that the administration has no strategy to resolve things with Beijing. Saying trade talks with China had “broken down,” Mnuchin basically admitted that the U.S. was out of ideas, and that it’s up to China to offer concessions—otherwise, the tariffs will continue. “Is there a master plan?” asked Representative Mia Love, to which we imagine Mnuchin became the human embodiment of the shrug emoji. Representative Jeb Hensarling, a supporter of the president, was unimpressed by Mnuchin’s claims that the Treasury is “monitoring the impact on the economy of all these trade issues,” telling the secretary, “I appreciate the words; I am concerned about the deeds.” Meanwhile, lawmakers on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee didn’t get much more out of Trump official Manisha Singh, who heads the State Department’s Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs:

“The administration needs to explain to Congress where this is all headed,” Senator Bob Corker told Singh. “To my knowledge, not a single person is able to articulate where this is headed, nor what the plans are, nor what the strategy is,” Corker said.

The committee’s top Democrat, Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, told Singh at another point that “I don’t understand what the pathway is here, at the end of the day.”

Singh . . . defended the administration’s moves. “Our endgame is for China to change its behavior,” she said.

After Singh tried to explain the administration’s approach, Corker replied, “That enlightened us in no way.”

For its part, China reportedly can’t even tell whom it’s supposed to be negotiating with, after tentative agreements with Mnuchin and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross fell through. “I think they’re coming to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter whether Mnuchin or Ross or anybody is in the front of the line, that it’s really going to be figuring out what Trump wants,” Claire Reade, an attorney at Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer, told The New York Times. On Thursday, China’s Ministry of Commerce issued a statement saying, “For the purpose of meeting domestic political needs and suppressing China’s development, the U.S. has fabricated a set of policy arguments that distort the truth about Sino-U.S. economic and trade relations.” Things, in other words, are going swimmingly.

Remember when Donald Trump told U.K. right-wing rag The Sun that British Prime Minister Theresa May had screwed up Brexit by trying to negotiate a “soft“ deal, and that if she went through with it it he’d likely cancel a previously planned bilateral trade deal between Britain and the U.S., and that her political rival, Boris Johnson, would make a great prime minister, at a time when May is facing a vote of no confidence? You should, because it happened just yesterday. But according to Trump, none of those things ever happened.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will make campaign swing through Kansas next week, rallying for two congressional candidates who argue that left-wing politics are the key to winning in red states.

“I’ve believed for years that the Democratic Party has committed political malpractice by writing off half the states in this country,” said Sanders in an interview, as he campaigned in Minnesota for Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.). “They’ve got to fight for every state in this country.”

Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez will head to Kansas on July 20. They’ll begin in Wichita, where James Thompson, who narrowly lost a special election in 2017, wants another chance to win the 4th Congressional District. They’ll continue with an event in the Kansas City suburbs for Brent Welder, a former Sanders delegate now seeking the Democratic nomination in the 3rd Congressional District.

Both districts are now held by Republicans who’ve voted reliably with their party — Reps. Kevin Yoder and Ron Estes. The 3rd District voted narrowly for Hillary Clinton in 2016; the 4th District, which is strongly Republican outside of Wichita, voted for Trump. In a short interview, Thompson said he would relish it if Estes and Republicans criticized him for campaigning with self-identified Democratic Socialists.

As she stood atop a table in a packed Bronx billiards hall to deliver her victory speech, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez — who by morning would be one of the most talked-about names in American politics — reeled off a list of other progressive candidates she said needed to be sent to Congress: Ayanna Pressley in Massachusetts, for example, or Cori Bush in Missouri.

By morning, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez had also trumpeted Ms. Bush and Ms. Pressley to her fast-growing Twitter following. Within the week, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez had dispatched her volunteers to canvass for Cynthia Nixon, Zephyr Teachout and Julia Salazar, candidates for New York governor, attorney general and State Senate.

Ms. Pressley gained 5,000 Twitter followers in 24 hours. More than 120 volunteers have signed up for Ms. Teachout’s campaign this week. In the same period, Ms. Salazar has raised more than $20,000.

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Women in politics have long banded together to craft formal policy and to share informal tips. Emily’s List, the influential national organization that works to elect Democratic women, runs a 5,000-member Facebook group for women who are seeking office, considering a bid or supporting other female candidates. Several of the candidates Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has embraced noted that their collaborations predated last Tuesday’s primary.