The net of state officials being held accountable for Flint’s lead poisoning crisis has grown wider to include health officials and top leadership in the state’s environmental quality division. Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette has filed criminal charges against six more state employees for their role in Flint’s water crisis, bringing the total facing trial to nine. There was a common theme to their offenses, he said in a press conference Friday.

“Each of these individuals attempted to bury, or cover up, to downplay or hide information that contradicted their own narrative. ... Their story was there was nothing wrong with Flint water and it was perfectly safe to use. These individuals concealed the truth. They were criminally wrong to do so.”

Prosecutors charged the head of the state environmental agency’s drinking water unit, Liane Shekter Smith, with withholding information about the serious health risks of drinking the water after lead contamination had begun. She is the only official who has been fired since the crisis unfolded. Two water regulators in the same division, Adam Rosenthal and Patrick Cook, were charged with falsifying water quality reports to the EPA and tampering with evidence on lead levels in the water. Cook’s emails even suggested that a whistleblowing EPA lead expert be silenced for his “over-reaches.”

Even more seriously, three employees in the state’s health department, including the manager of the early childhood health section, a data analyst, and a state epidemiologist, were all found to have concealed what they knew about the significant rise in Flint children reporting elevated lead levels in their blood.

As with the earlier set of cases brought against state officials in April, state prosecutors promised this was still only the beginning of the investigation. Meanwhile, for the families and children waiting for relief, the water in Flint is still not considered safe to drink.

Three judges from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the law, which was passed in 2013 ostensibly to combat voter fraud. “Voting in many areas of North Carolina is racially polarized,” wrote Judge Diana Motz, “we can only conclude that the North Carolina General Assembly enacted the challenged provisions of the law with discriminatory intent.”

The ruling went on to say that the law attempted to remedy problems that did not exist, instead targeting a demographic that overwhelmingly votes Democratic. This is the fourth time in less than two weeks that courts have overturned voter suppression measures passed by Republican state legislatures.

In a panoramic sense, the fundraising letter Ryan sent on Trump’s behalf Thursday doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already to know. The GOP is mostly sorted at this point between Trump enablers and Trump opponents, and the Republican House speaker picked his side several weeks ago. He has no light left to shed, no integrity left to sacrifice.

But it does reveal more about the depths to which Ryan, personally, is willing to stoop to achieve whatever he imagines the upsides of a Trump presidency would be. It tells us he didn’t endorse Trump merely out of a sense of obligation to do the bare minimum on his party’s behalf at a disorienting moment.

Trump brags constantly about being worth $10 billion. That precise figure has been convincingly called into question, but this is how Trump represents himself to his supporters. The fact that Trump insists on raising money from hard-up Republican voters implies one of two things. Either, Trump is actually worth billions but wants the disaffected people whose interests he’s supposedly fighting for to pay for his campaign, rather than put a tiny dent in his fortune; or he doesn’t have anywhere near that much money and he’s been flatly lying to his supporters all along. Under which scenario is it OK for Ryan to ask his own contributors to give their money to Trump? A candidate who either can pony up himself, or is a fraud, and in either case is someone Ryan has called a racist.

We can’t chalk this up to Ryan being in an impossible position and making the wrong call—it speaks to him being a willful participant in something he knows is horrible.

The New York Times reports that four people in Florida—three men and one woman—have contracted the virus, which health department officials believe to have been transmitted by local mosquitos. If this turns out to be true, it will be the first instance of mosquitos carrying the virus inside the U.S. (all previous cases of Zika in the country have been from travel abroad).

The news does not come as a surprise—officials have been preparing for this eventual scenario for months. However, the timing only highlights Congress’s inability to pass the $1.9 billion funding bill that President Obama requested to combat the virus. Marco Rubio, one of the few Republicans who is pushing for full funding, stated back in April, “I don’t think we want to be halfway through the summer and wake up to the news that hundreds and hundreds of Americans in multiple states have been infected and we did nothing.”

Yesterday, I wrote about Kaine having come out in opposition to the Hyde Amendment. This is, alas, no longer operative. In an interview with CNN this morning, Kaine said that he hadn’t “changed his position” on the Hyde Amendment, which prevents public funding from being used to obtain abortions. The comment was not preceded or succeeded by any qualification that, irrespective of his personal views as vice president, he would support the position of the party’s presidential nominee and platform, both of which oppose the Hyde Amendment.

Substantively, this isn’t the biggest deal in the world. If he becomes vice president, he’s not going to have any effect on Hillary Clinton’s abortion policy. The party’s presidential nominees and its platform are better indicators of the party’s direction on abortion than the vice president’s views, and Clinton is running on the most progressive reproductive rights platform in American history. It is a strike against Kaine should he run for the party’s nomination in 2024, but the short-term impact is negligible.

This flip-flopping and/or miscommunication, however, does undermine the rationale for picking him in the first place. As I mentioned in my piece yesterday, even before this there were reasons for liberals to be somewhat skeptical of Kaine, and I would have preferred Labor Secretary Tom Perez. The argument for Kaine over Perez relied in large measure on the fact that Perez hasn’t held statewide elected office, so he represented a riskier choice than the more seasoned Kaine. Kaine’s inability to stay on message on an issue of considerable importance to the Democratic Party’s base is exactly the kind of mistake the boring-but-experienced-moderate-white guy is not supposed to make.

They are natural allies in the fight to make government secrets available to the public. But on Thursday, Snowden publicly criticized Wikileaks’s indiscriminate approach to releasing data. Wikileaks’s response was quick and below-the-belt, accusing Snowden of shilling for Hillary Clinton’s favor in the hope of receiving a pardon.

The public feud is striking, considering their record of collaboration, including Wikileaks’s assistance in helping Snowden find a place to live in exile. And Snowden, for what it’s worth, is no fan of Clinton.

A clue to the discord lies beyond the U.S. election, in Turkey. Wikileaks’s much-hyped “Erdrogan emails,” released after the failed Turkish coup, appear to be a bust. Instead of government communications, the trove of 300,000 emails included links to databases containing the personal information of citizens, including more than 20 million female voters’ addresses and phone numbers.

In online skirmishes over the Turkey emails, Wikileaks again demonstrated that it is unable to accept criticism of its methods without accusing the other party of ulterior motives, even if that person, in this case Turkish-born sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, is a prominent critic of Erdrogan and his government.

It was a common refrain throughout the primary: that it would be nigh impossible for the former first lady, senator, and secretary of state, who has lived the bulk of her adult life in the harsh glare of the national stage, to get voters to see her in a new light. Voters had made up their minds, the thinking went. Their conception of Hillary Clinton had set long ago, and was as hard as plaster. And what that meant, for the most part, was that she would go into the general election as one of the least popular candidates in modern history.

But on the day after she became the first woman to accept the presidential nomination of her party, there is a sense that our idea of Hillary has changed—and that her image has grown more malleable at the edges. Part of this the afterglow of a successful convention that successfully cast her candidacy as a culminating struggle of the women’s rights movement. It also cast her as an inveterate do-gooder, diving into thankless, unsexy social work from the second she graduated from college, a portrait that could not be further from the scheming Lady Macbeth version of Hillary that we are all so familiar with. The two strands, of course, are intertwined: A woman winning the Oval Office after years of virtually invisible hard work and very public abuse is just about the only way it could have happened in America.

But there is another reason Clinton seems made new, and it lies in the age-old notion that, for whatever reason, she is incapable of revealing her authentic self to voters. Admittedly, it’s a complaint that rests on a dubious premise, for politics is perhaps the only field outside the theater where one can truly say the world is all a stage. (The political genius of Trump, in many ways, is to completely collapse the distinction between a private and public self.) Still, it can’t be denied that Clinton can be cagey, scripted, an outgrowth of her practically pathological relationship with the press. There have been times when an inner chink of light has burst forth—such as when she nearly, but not quite, let a tear fall down her cheek prior to the 2008 New Hampshire primary—and the response from voters has been immediate.

There was something of that light in her eyes last night—when she mentioned her mother, Dorothy Rodham, for example. But it was most evident when she first came out on stage, when she was, for lack of a better word, happy. The ungenerous interpretation would be that only victory can appease a soul that is Machiavellian all the way down. But you could also say that being the first woman presidential nominee suits her; furthermore, that it has changed her, enlarged her, giving some relief to a person whose innermost ambition has never had its outer validation. Perhaps this is Hillary’s true self at last, or at least her true self-conception. If we would scoff at that, it might be because we’ve never seen its like before.

After Trump’s fellow billionaire stomped on his business credentials at the DNC, they are no longer friends. At a rally in Iowa yesterday, he said he really wanted to hit someone who sounded a lot like the former New York mayor. “I was gonna hit one guy in particular, a very little guy,” Trump said at his rally. “I was gonna hit this guy so hard, his head would spin, he wouldn’t know what the hell happened.” As usual, he also took his complaints to Twitter.

However, Trump didn’t always hate Bloomberg. The New York Times reports that they had limited yet cordial relations and even played golf together at a charity event at one of Trump’s golf courses during Bloomberg’s second term. Their daughters are also reportedly friends. And Trump supported Bloomberg’s administration, tweeting out years ago:

In the weeks and months leading up to the RNC, Trump kept insisting that his RNC would be a different RNC—a Trump production. “It will be a convention unlike any we’ve ever seen. It will be substantive. It will be interesting. It will be different. … It’s not gonna be a ho-hum lineup of the typical politicians,” Trump told a radio host in June. He promised glitz and celebrities and no boring speeches. Instead, he delivered an endless parade of people no one has heard of. Besides Jon Voight, who narrated a video about Trump’s life, Scott Baio was arguably the biggest star to appear.

But who else is on the stage has rarely mattered when Trump is there—he is, as he has consistently reminded voters this year, a one-man ratings machine. He made an appearance on every night of the convention, seemingly to make that point. When the RNC faltered—when his wife read a speech containing a passage plagiarized from Michelle Obama, for example—he pointed at the ratings.

And then he got smoked by the DNC, which put on the star-studded convention that Trump promised. Alicia Keys, Meryl Streep, Eva Longoria, Elizabeth Banks, Katy Perry, Paul Simon, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Sarah Silverman, Lena Dunham, and America Ferrara all appeared. More people watched the DNC, which has led Trump to quickly distance himself from his own convention. When asked by The New York Times why his convention was so disorganized and lacked any star power, Trump said, “I didn’t produce our show—I just showed up for the final speech on Thursday.” He told the Hollywood Reporter, “I think we had, if you include my children and the great success that they had, I would say we had tremendous star power. But I wasn’t looking for star power, I was looking for policy.” Which is hilarious.

The biggest difference between the two conventions, however, wasn’t the star power, but the organization. The RNC had ostensible themes, but it rarely stuck to them, instead hitting the same note—Hillary Clinton should be jailed—again and again. The DNC, meanwhile, spent time building narratives about what the office of the presidency means, the state of the country today, and who Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are. The RNC was a high school talent show; the DNC was the Oscars.

The question, though, is how much that star power—and the Reagan-esque Morning in America narrative—will matter to voters. Convention bounces don’t mean much, but Trump put on an objectively whacky and low-rent convention and he got a huge one. We’ll find out next week if and how Hillary benefits from her convention.