“All of us, as Americans, should be troubled by these shootings, because these are not isolated incidents,” said President Barack Obama following the horrific shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. “They’re symptomatic of a broader set of racial disparities that exist in our criminal-justice system.” In an American tragedy of the nation’s own making, Obama will end his historic presidency with racial turmoil rocking the nation. The person whose election brought so much hope about the trajectory of race relations in the United States, a country that has perpetually suffered from the original sin of slavery, is spending these days desperately trying to calm the anger over police killings of African Americans and the protests and violence that have ensued.

With just over two weeks to go before the Republican National Convention, there’s no sign that Donald Trump has made progress on unifying the party he purportedly leads.

The last two weeks have shown that while Trump is able to pick up a few supporters, he’s not making serious inroads among the holdouts who have so far refused to back him. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s July 6 announcement that he’s backing Trump is an outlier, and even that is almost comedically tepid—he didn’t deign to use Trump’s name in a tweet. Meanwhile, there’s been a steady list of prominent conservatives coming out against him. One pattern that emerges is that the people backing Trump tend to be non-elected officials, some of them retired and others in politics-adjacent fields, like leaders of conservative Christian groups. Among officeholders, however, Trump is losing ground or stuck in neutral—perhaps an indication of how electorally toxic he is, or perhaps a reflection of deep misgivings about the lack of organization and fundraising on his campaign so far.

In the days prior to the release of June’s fantastic jobs report, there were a lot of worries, from economists and analysts and even the Federal Reserve, about whether the U.S. economy was in fact stalling. But the number of jobs added in June—287,000—turned out to be a huge rebound from May’s miserly 11,000. Tom Perez, the U.S. Labor Secretary, says he believes that the economy continues to move in the right direction.

“The June report again shows what the broader trend data has shown over the last five, six years—which is that the economy is resilient,” said Perez in a phone interview Friday. “There may be aberrational months, like last month, but when you look at broader trend data, which is what we need to do to make judgments about the state of the economy, we continue to move in the right direction.”

This small-town chief is becoming Internet-famous for his wisdom.

On Wednesday, a Minnesota police officer shot and killed a school cafeteria manager during a traffic stop for a broken taillight. As Philando Castile, 32, bled in his vehicle, his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, broadcast the aftermath on Facebook Live. She said that her boyfriend was reaching for his I.D. at the police officer’s instruction when he was shot, having already declared that he was legally carrying a firearm. The policeman said, “I told him not to reach for it! I told him to get his hands up.”

A young child was also in the vehicle during the shooting.

Because the shooting itself was not captured on video, the whole truth may not out. The public may never know if a panicked Philando Castile moved in a way that would alarm a reasonable police officer, or if the police officer was negligent, or incompetent, or malignant, or if both of them erred in small ways that added up to tragedy.

On Wednesday, a scene that passed for exciting—at least by Capitol Hill standards—unfolded when demonstrators in the Senate gallery showered $2,000 upon lawmakers in the chamber below.

Rather than a taxpayer-initiated raise, the stunt was in protest of a federal bill that would force food manufacturers to label products that contain genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) according to terms that some say are too accommodating of big food companies and farm-industry groups. Despite the interjection of the “Monsanto money,” the bill passed in the Senate late on Thursday evening. The bill, which still needs the approval of the House and the president, is actually meant to preempt a tougher GMO-labeling law that went into effect last week in Vermont and is the latest flashpoint in a vicious, years-long battle over GMOs. (An overwhelming scientific consensus suggests that the vilification of GMOs is unjustified.)

Several years ago, Gallup asked people in 142 countries to respond to a series of statements designed to measure employee engagement—involving matters like their job satisfaction, whether they felt their work was important, and whether they had opportunities in the workplace to learn and grow. What the polling firm found was that engagement is the exception, not the rule: Worldwide, 13 percent of employees were engaged at work, while 63 percent were not engaged and 24 percent were “actively disengaged,” meaning they were unhappy and unproductive. Engagement rates were highest in the United States and Canada, and lowest in East Asia.

“About one in eight workers … are psychologically committed to their jobs and likely to be making positive contributions to their organizations,” Gallup noted. “The bulk of employees worldwide ... lack motivation and are less likely to invest discretionary effort in organizational goals or outcomes.”

If the U.S. presidential campaign has made one thing clear, it’s this: The United States is not Finland. Nor is it Norway. This might seem self-evident. But America’s Americanness has had to be reaffirmed ever since Bernie Sanders suggested that Americans could learn something from Nordic countries about reducing income inequality, providing people with universal health care, and guaranteeing them paid family and medical leave.

“I think Bernie Sanders is a good candidate for president … of Sweden,” Marco Rubio scoffed. “We don’t want to be Sweden. We want to be the United States of America.”

“We are not Denmark,” Hillary Clinton clarified. “We are the United States of America. … [W]hen I think about capitalism, I think about all the small businesses that were started because we have the opportunity and the freedom in our country for people to do that and to make a good living for themselves and their families.”

In the mourning over the murders of five police officers in Dallas, and relief that the standoff had ended, one unusual detail stuck out: the manner in which police killed one suspect after negotiations failed.

“We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was,” Chief David Brown said in a press conference Friday morning. “Other options would have exposed our officers to grave danger. The suspect is deceased … He’s been deceased because of a detonation of the bomb.”

That use of a robot raises questions about the way police adopt and use new technologies. While many police forces have adopted robots—or, more accurately, remote-controlled devices—for uses like bomb detonation or delivery of non-lethal force like tear gas, using one to kill a suspect is at least highly unusual and quite possibly unprecedented.

First of all, they shouldn’t ask.

“As a basic principle, we can’t tell you to stop recording,” says Delroy Burton, chairman of D.C.’s metropolitan police union and a 21-year veteran on the force. “If you’re standing across the street videotaping, and I’m in a public place, carrying out my public functions, [then] I’m subject to recording, and there’s nothing legally the police officer can do to stop you from recording.”

“What you don’t have a right to do is interfere,” he says. “Record from a distance, stay out of the scene, and the officer doesn’t have the right to come over and take your camera, confiscate it.”

Officers do have a right to tell you to stop interfering with their work, Burton told me, but they still aren’t allowed to destroy film.