The economy is one of the biggest issues this election cycle. In past elections where the economy has featured prominently, the biggest concerns are usually jobs or unemployment or fear of a recession. This year, and for the first time in generations, inflation is the big concern.

The most recent inflation reading of the consumer price index, the most closely watched inflation gauge, showed that inflation fell slightly to 3.4% for the year ending in April. While the data showed a decline, that number is still well above the 2% level that the Federal Reserve considers healthy.

The small downtick also follows months of increases. Late last year, inflation began falling quickly, leading consumers to believe the price-growth plague was coming to an end and the Fed would begin cutting interest rates. But those expectations have faded greatly as inflation readings in 2024 continue to disappoint.

A day before the CPI data were released, the producer price index, which gauges wholesale inflation, rose slightly once again, the third straight monthly increase.

Republicans are squarely blaming Biden for the high inflation and, in turn, the higher interest rates. They contend that a rash of federal spending under Biden artificially juiced demand and caused prices to rise, an attack they have used and will continue to use on the campaign trail.

“This report confirms that the grip of inflation won’t loosen anytime soon, even after 11 interest rate increases since March 2022,” House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington (R-TX) said after the latest CPI report. “The massive amount of federal spending by President Biden and Democrats has made this inflationary firestorm difficult to contain.”

Perhaps even more crucially for Biden is how the hotter numbers are shifting inflation expectations and consumer sentiment, which is how voters feel about the economy.

The University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index plunged to 67.4 in May, down from nearly 77.4 in April, according to early numbers for the month. That marks a nearly 13% decline over just the past month alone and shows consumers are souring on the economy and their perceived economic conditions.

“This 10 index-point decline is statistically significant and brings sentiment to its lowest reading in about six months,” survey director Joanne Hsu said. “This month’s trend in sentiment is characterized by a broad consensus across consumers, with decreases across age, income, and education groups.”

Year-ahead inflation expectations also rose, as did long-run inflation expectations, another troubling metric for the Biden campaign.

An April Bloomberg News-Morning Consult poll found that a mere 18% of registered voters predict that inflation will improve by the end of the year, while 75% said they think it will either stay the same or actually get worse. Further, 70% say the overall U.S. economy is going on the wrong track.

Additionally, the Conference Board’s consumer confidence index fell to 97 in April, down from a revised 103.1 the month before. That marks the lowest consumer confidence reading in 22 months.

The expectations index, which tracks the short-term outlook of consumers for business, income, and labor market conditions, fell to 66.4 this month from 74 in March. An expectations index reading below 80 often signals a forthcoming recession, according to the Conference Board, more alarm bells for Biden.

“Confidence retreated further in April, reaching its lowest level since July 2022 as consumers became less positive about the current labor market situation and more concerned about future business conditions, job availability, and income,” Dana Peterson, chief economist at the Conference Board, said.

Dan North, a senior economist with Allianz Trade Americas, told the Washington Examiner after the release of the most recent CPI report that while it ticked down by a tenth of a percentage point, inflation has remained in a narrow band between 3% and 3.7% for nearly a year now, more than a full percentage point over what the Fed considers healthy.

The Fed has raised its interest rate target from 5.25% to 5.50%, the highest since the dot-com bubble at the turn of the century. The biggest question now is when the Fed will start cutting rates, although recent hotter-than-anticipated inflation reports have increased the odds of fewer cuts in 2024. Most investors expect the first rate cut to come in September.

North said the latest report doesn’t do much to move the needle toward quicker interest rate cuts.

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“It’s not enough to move the Fed by any means off of, in our opinions, September. It’s a good thing it’s not a surprise to the upside, which we’ve had too much of, but we’re still a long, long way from 2%,” North said.

If inflation readings keep showing little progress toward moving inflation down to the Fed’s goal, it could also push back the first rate cut until after the November elections, something that would further hurt Biden. Higher rates make things like buying a home or taking out a loan much more expensive for voters.

The storm system left a trail of destruction with numerous downed trees, damages to high-rise buildings in Texas cities, and left over one million people in the Houston area without power, according to reports.

“If you lived through the core of these winds, you went through the equivalent of a Cat 1, if not a Cat. 2 hurricane,” said David Paul, Chief Meteorologist for KHOU 11.

Several tornado warnings were issued for the area by the National Weather Service, but no tornadoes were reported. Strong winds estimated to be 70 miles per hour and higher were believed to be behind the carnage in the area. Houston Mayor John Whitmire encouraged people to stay inside and off the road and told people not to go to work tomorrow.

“Stay at home tonight. Do not go to work tomorrow unless you’re an essential worker. Stay home, take care of your children,” Whitmire said during a press conference on Thursday evening. “Our first responders will be working around the clock.”

Whitmire also announced the deaths of the four people due to the storms. Two people died from falling trees, and another person was killed when strong winds caused a crane to blow over. It was not reported on how the fourth fatality occurred.

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Numerous streets were flooded, and hotels and office buildings in Houston’s downtown area were reportedly severely damaged by the storms. Debris from the damaged buildings was scattered throughout the city’s streets. Texas had deployed its Department of Public Safety officers to the area to provide assistance.

According to reports, all classes in the Houston Independent School District were canceled Friday because of the storms. 

If the multiverse is having a moment, it is only because “the Science” continues to have a bigger one. One might expect, observing the hard sciences’ replication crisis, a little representational modesty. How about a series in which a heroic researcher eschews p-hacking and gets the same results twice in a row? Instead, we have quantum superpositions. Scratch a popular screen production these days, and one is likely to find the well-credentialed bending time and space to their will. In Everything Everywhere All at Once, the 2023 Oscar winner, Michelle Yeoh’s Alpha-Evelyn discovered “verse-jumping” seemingly by accident, so exceptional was her apparent brilliance. It wasn’t Mister but Doctor Strange who strode through Marvel’s “Multiverse of Madness” the previous year. It’s all nonsense, of course, but of a peculiarly triumphalist kind. 

Given this context, it is no surprise to find Apple’s latest taking for granted its own narrative plausibility. Kidnapped into an alternate reality, the show’s protagonist barely asks questions, so complete is his faith in physics to achieve the impossible. Fifteen years ago, the same program might have saved its quantum gobbledygook for a late-episode “reveal,” stunning viewers with a high-theory exposition dump. The Dark Matter of today, by contrast, throws us into the deep end halfway through its pilot. With the multiverse on every tongue, there is simply no need to disguise the engine driving the show’s brazenly ridiculous plot.

Dark Matter stars Joel Edgerton as Jason Dessen, a physics professor at a Chicago-area community college. Married to artist Daniela (Jennifer Connelly), Jason enjoys a comfortable life and has no regrets about a long-ago decision to prioritize family over the lab. Things change when, one rainy evening, a masked man abducts our hero and injects him with a mysterious syringe. Upon waking, Jason finds himself known to all as a famous scientist and entrepreneur. Even Daniela has changed, recalling him as a one-time boyfriend but decidedly not as a husband. 

If the plot I’ve summarized thus far owes much to The Twilight Zone, the similarity is often to the good. Like “The Parallel,” a fourth-season episode anticipating today’s alternate-universes obsession, Dark Matter captures well the existential terror of being the only sane man in the world. Helping matters greatly is the performance of Edgerton, who brings to his protagonist role a bruised vulnerability reminiscent of Steve Forrest’s in 1963. Who cares if the Australian roughneck is as believable a physicist as Leonardo DiCaprio would be a priest? The actor nails Jason’s panicked frustration. 

To whom does one turn when one’s sense of reality matches no one else’s? The answer, for a while, is Connelly’s Daniela, who possesses, in both universes, all of the actress’s customary warmth. Later, a psychiatrist named Amanda (Alice Braga) plays an important role as our hero explores the technology responsible for his crisis. Through it all, Jason’s goal is simple: to get back to “real” life and vanquish the kidnapper who has stolen his very existence. To do so, he will have to enter “the Box,” a room-sized, steampunkish cube that holds a gateway to every possible world. 

It is no spoiler to reveal that the villain being chased is Jason himself. The series shows us as much half an hour into the pilot. Brash and swaggering, this doppelganger is the very man our protagonist has been mistaken for. What he wants is a taste of married life with Daniela, an outcome he foreclosed in his own reality by choosing careerism and pecuniary success. 

Is it a sign of bad morals that I found myself cheering for the false Jason? He is certainly the more interesting figure, dressing down “his” bored students one moment and seducing Daniela the next. In a plot twist that delivers much-needed emotional complexity, Connelly’s character finds herself at least temporarily impressed by her husband’s alteration. Like Beauty preferring the Beast, she wants the dangerous man, not her familiar milquetoast. Never mind that fake Jason knows nothing about their life together and can’t get through a dinner party without a who’s-who cheat sheet. 

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For the most part, Dark Matter balances its dueling plotlines well, shifting between Jasons like a magician flipping a coin. Less compelling are the graspers and hangers-on who dog the real Jason in his adopted realm: Dayo Okeniyi as a fanatical corporate stooge and Jimmi Simpson as our protagonist’s apprehensive frenemy. I suppose these supporting players are necessary if the show is to fill nine hours. Then again, the program feels bloated even at its best. If ever there were a series that could have lopped off four episodes, this is it. 

Still, one is tempted, coming to the end of each installment, to let the next one start up. Dark Matter is handsomely produced, reasonably intriguing, and the beneficiary of two solid leads. At least in this iteration of our universe, there are far worse shows. 

Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.

So terrifying is this moment — and so identified has it become with the film that surrounds it — that when Turner Classic Movies asked filmmaker Chuck Workman to assemble a montage of great movies from the art form’s first 100 years, he chose Backlinie’s startling expression of shock as the moment that would stand in for the entirety of Jaws. We didn’t need to see any scenes with the stars Richard Dreyfuss, Roy Scheider, or Robert Shaw; all that was required to identify the movie was Backlinie’s iconic reaction to her sudden, shocking encounter with a shark. 

Backlinie died on May 11 at age 77. Even allowing for the relative slimness of her resume, it seems obvious that Backlinie may not have had the acting pedigree of the best thespians of the age. Yet it is to her credit that she achieved cinematic immortality thanks to a relatively fleeting scene defined by shock and awe.

Not that Backlinie had spent her early days dreaming of a future career in show business. Born in 1946 in Washington, D.C., Backlinie was as athletic as she appears in Jaws, when, just before the attack, she is seen gracefully sprinting toward the beach while depositing articles of clothing for a male admirer who is straining to catch up to her. After relocating with her family at age 10 to West Palm Beach, Florida, Backlinie immersed herself in aquatics: As a high-schooler, she won the state freestyle swimming championship, and, in her 20s, she gained employment in live shows presented by the studio run by Ivan Tors, responsible for such wildlife-oriented programming as Sea Hunt and movies like Flipper. 

When she was up for the part in Jaws, Backlinie argued to Spielberg that there were advantages to having a single performer execute the scene in Jaws, rather than an actress for some shots and a stuntwoman for others. “I said, ‘If you use me, you could get close-ups during the stunt itself,’” Backlinie recalled to the Palm Beach Post in 2015. “‘If you use an actress, she’ll have to hide her face.’”

The scene in Jaws goes on, excruciatingly, beyond the moment when Backlinie first realizes she is under attack: The actress was seemingly being wrenched in every direction by the attacking shark — in reality, the work of stuntmen holding cables that were affixed to plates on Backlinie’s jeans.

“As I would feel my hips go to one side, I would just throw my arms in the opposite direction as hard as I could,” Backlinie told the Palm Beach Post. “I also had a pair of fins on because when they would pull me to one side, I would go under, so I had to kick with all my strength to stay above the water. It took a lot of energy, but I was in pretty good shape back then.”

And so she remained: Four years after Jaws, Spielberg coaxed Backlinie to return to the water in the director’s hugely unsuccessful (but greatly entertaining) World War II spoof, 1941. In a delirious Mad magazine-style self-parody, Backlinie gallops out to sea, but, this time, her swim is interrupted not by a shark but by a Japanese submarine suspiciously surfacing in American waters. 

Her appearance in the still-underestimated 1941 arguably represented the final minute of her 15 minutes of fame, but she had already made a modest career for herself both in front of, and behind, the camera. She turned up in such relatively undistinguished movies as The Grizzly and the Treasure (1975) and Day of the Animals (1977) and on TV series including The Quest, Quark, and The Fall Guy. She also accumulated credits as a stuntwoman and animal trainer. Perhaps her most apropos post-Jaws film appearance was as part of a water ballet in 1981’s The Great Muppet Caper.

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Backlinie retained a healthy perspective (and sense of humor) about the role that came to define her life. “I worked on dive boats many years, and some of the guys I worked with were a lot younger than me,” she recalled in the documentary The Shark Is Still Working. “They would say to me, ‘You know, you were the first woman I ever saw with no clothes on.’ I just laugh. What do you say? … You hope it was a good view.”

Because of its overwhelming box-office success, Jaws instantly became fodder for Hollywood’s sequel machine, but the three spinoffs never came close to equaling the first film’s imagination, intensity, and astonishing ability to petrify. Maybe that’s partly because those movies were missing Susan Backlinie.

Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.

The vote was 23-19 in favor of moving forward with holding Garland in contempt. The resolution was put forward against Garland for refusing to hand over audio recordings from special counsel Robert Hur’s interview with President Joe Biden related to his classified documents case.

Earlier in the day, the House Judiciary Committee voted to move forward with its own contempt resolution. Oversight was supposed to have their meeting in the morning as well, but they pushed it to 8 p.m. because several Republican committee members attended former President Donald Trump’s hush money criminal trial in New York.

That was a point of contention upon the start of the hearing Thursday night, with Democrats, such as Oversight Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) upset about the nature of the delay, with the latter calling it “Oversight after Dark.”

The temperature of the hearing was raised after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) took a jab at Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s (D-TX) appearance, leading Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) to demand an apology. MTG refused to give one, even attacking AOC’s intelligence as she spoke.

The hearing reached a boiling point when Crockett’s time to speak came up, and she went after MTG’s appearance, prompting Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) to call her out of line and Crockett to start yelling and allude to MTG having “talk[ed] s***.” Chairman James Comer (R-KY) desperately tried to maintain order, but he could neither hear nor handle all of the various voices and comments going back and forth to put a stop to it.

The hearing eventually went to recess, before resuming, and eventually, about three hours after its start, the committee finished voting on the resolution that brought them all there.

The moves by the GOP-led House Oversight and Judiciary committees are part of a larger effort by Republicans to build an impeachment case against Biden over his handling of classified documents.

“The House Oversight and Judiciary Committees issued lawful subpoenas to Attorney General Garland for the audio recordings of President Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Hur, yet he continues to defy our subpoenas,”  Comer said in advance of the hearing.

“These audio recordings are important to our investigation of President Biden’s willful retention of classified documents and his fitness to be President of the United States. There must be consequences for refusing to comply with lawful congressional subpoenas and we will move to hold Attorney General Garland in contempt of Congress,” he added, fortelling what was to come.

Like Twilight Zone auteur Rod Serling, the cultural prophet who wrote the initial screenplay to the 1968 original, series overseers Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa understood that an apocalyptic fantasy loses its power if it ever seems too serious — or if it’s not serious enough. In the 1968 Planet of the Apes, the main apocalyptic error under examination is racism. The astronaut Charlton Heston, a symbol of American civilizational hubris, crash-lands on a planet where the slaves have replaced their masters and a courageous, muscular white man is treated as a freakish outsider. Apes was Serling’s final attempt to literalize the insanities of a zero-sum notion of human existence. In the reboot trilogy, humanity is doomed by a not-unrelated flaw. As a plot review in the opening screen of the newly released Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes puts it, a “man-made virus” meant to turn apes into our quasi-intelligent helpmates instead kills nearly every human being while “robbing [the survivors] of their intellect and their ability to speak.” In the ’60s, an unreconstructed belief in our superiority will destroy us. In the new millennium, it’s humanity’s ambition to bust through moral guardrails and master the physical world that will reduce the species to mute idiocy. 

The franchise’s last entry, 2017’s War for the Planet of the Apes, concluded in this queasy suicide of human reason, with man and ape trading roles in the natural order. In Kingdom, which takes place hundreds of years later, we find out the monkeys haven’t done much with their human-free paradise. Our hero, Noa, lives in a nonliterate society of gentle apes who train eagles to hunt for them and dwell among the overgrown ruins of a civilization everyone’s forgotten and indeed has no curiosity about. Even Raka, the wisest of all apes and the only ape in the movie who can read, informs Noa that a terminal at what used to be Los Angeles International Airport was probably a facility where apes could care for humans, to make sure the stupid beasts’ material needs were met. Its construction was undoubtedly an act of the compassionate Caesar, liberator of the apes, protagonist of the prior three films, and the now-mythological Lawgiver who, Raka says, “taught us what it means to be ape.” The now-vanished and bastardized Caesarian thought system taught that coexistence with the human scavengers was important to ape self-knowledge, though even Raka can’t remember why. Noa, meanwhile, doesn’t even know who Caeser is. 

The intellectually and technologically backward wuss apes of Eagle Clan are not the only apes on this planet, thank the Lawgiver. A couple of valleys over is Proximus Caesar, a great ape of history and an enlightened despot who claims to be the rightful heir to the Caesarian project, whatever that is. Per Proximus, Caesar believed apes should dominate the Earth, however many ape or human dead it takes. In a world where no one can read and history doesn’t exist, there aren’t many apes around who feel inclined to argue with him. With the help of a rare talking and thinking human being who’s immune from the virus, Proximus has determined, with some justification, that the Planet of the Apes lacks the conditions for a rational labor market, meaning that civilization can only progress through mass coercion and rapid technological advancement. Exhibiting a keenly unsentimental understanding of how states and societies form, Proximus declares himself king, enslaves the wuss apes, and puts them to work busting through a vault of ancient human weaponry. 

Did the long-ago Caesar want a stagnant yet decent world of interspecies harmony or one where apes were self-assured, brutally enlightened, and hostile toward those wily humans, however few of them are left with their brains intact? Sapient minds may differ. Nonetheless, the movie, whose screenplay was largely written before 2020, commits a number of satisfying heresies against the adjustments that correctness-minded Hollywood types have made to their view of reality between 2020 and now: The action begins with a lab leak, the evil of Proximus’s Nietzschean apes is denoted through their wearing masks, and we are in a dystopia where nobody reads or knows anything, making historical memory both seamless and necessary to manipulate. Imagine living in such an awful world!

There is a welcome diagnosis of our present manias buried in Kingdom, though a 145-minute CGI film is an oddly unself-aware vehicle for a movie that takes an overall negative view of the eclipse of the human. This being 2024, it doesn’t give much away to note that nature still beats civilization in this particular film, as it did back on Endor and in FernGully, as well as on whatever the Avatar planet is called. Surely the bird-loving forest folk are Good and the people bearing technology and organized political and military institutions are Bad.

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Once we make it to the climactic battle between Noa and Proximus over the apes’ Caesarian inheritance — over what it means to be ape or human or whatever; the metaphors get a little mixed after 10 whole films of this stuff — we’re reminded for the umpteenth time that civilization itself might not be worth it and we should probably just return to our treehouses and grottoes before it’s too late. Serling didn’t believe this: His Planet of the Apes was an enlightened republic where science and argument were valued. Dr. Zaius wasn’t a chest-thumping simpleton but a simian Socrates, leading his student Heston on a quest of tragic self-discovery that ends with the final human kneeling before unmistakable proof that he’s the real brute and the torch of civilization has passed to what he arrogantly believed to be his inferiors. 

Nine films later, Kingdom suggests that the franchise is finally too derivative, and too cynical, to reach anything like this former level of terrible insight.

Armin Rosen is a New York-based reporter at large for Tablet.

The hearing got off to a rocky start regarding why everyone was meeting — committee members were discussing whether to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt — and why so late in the day. Greene asked committee Democrats if any of them was employing Judge Juan Merchan’s daughter, alluding to the New York hush money trial former President Donald Trump faces.

Crockett responded by asking what that had to do with Garland, asking Greene if she knew what they were meeting for. “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up your reading,” Greene shot back.

Greene’s comment angered Rep. Alexandria Oscasio-Cortez (D-NY), who demanded that Greene’s words be struck from the record. 

“Are your feelings hurt?” Greene asked Oscasio-Cortez. 

“Oh baby girl … don’t even play,” Oscasio-Cortez said.

The exchange derailed the meeting for a half hour as Crockett, Oscasio-Cortez, Greene, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) went back and forth, with Chairman James Comer (R-KY) trying desperately to maintain order. 

Oscasio-Cortez demanded that Greene apologize for her comment, but instead, Greene refused and suggested that Oscasio-Cortez debate her instead. Greene went on to say that Oscasio-Cortez does not have the intelligence to debate her. Oscasio-Cortez then moved for Greene’s words to be struck again.

When Crockett was given time to speak, she alluded to Greene having a “bleach blonde, bad-built, butch body.” Crockett smiled after her remark, and a shouting match ensued. Luna told the Texas Democrat to calm down.

“Don’t tell me to calm down,” Crockett demanded. “Because if I come and talk s*** about her, y’all are going to have a problem.”

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By 10 p.m., a vote on holding Garland in contempt of Congress was still not taken. Earlier in the day, the House Judiciary Committee voted to advance the contempt resolution against Garland for refusing to hand over audio recordings from special counsel Robert Hur’s interview with Biden related to his classified documents case.

Oversight Democrats were upset that the hearing was pushed until the evening Thursday due to a handful of Republicans on the committee going to Manhattan to support Trump in his trial.

The Israel Summit was forced to find a new location when Sonesta Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee, backed out of the event slated for May 20-22. This is the first conference of its kind, born as a result of the attacks against Israel by the terrorist group Hamas.

Ramsey’s financial advisory company, Ramsey Solutions, and Israel Summit co-host Joshua Waller reportedly confirmed that the event will now take place at the Ramsey Solutions Arena in the same city. The Washington Examiner reached out to the Israel Summit and Ramsey Solutions for comment.

The event includes a gala dinner along with a concert and speaker conference. The most expensive and exclusive tickets that include the full experience have sold out. The website continues to sell tickets but has not listed a location.

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This summit is sponsored by the Israel Guys, a podcast that airs Mondays through Fridays featuring “updates coming straight from the ground in Israel.” There have been 97 episodes since Nov. 6, about one month after the attacks on Israel. The summit will feature over a dozen speakers, among them 2012 presidential candidate Michele Bachmann.

Israel is over 220 days into its conflict with Hamas in Gaza. There are still some 134 hostages that were taken from southern Israel in the custody of Hamas.

“We are deeply concerned by reports suggesting that the U.S. Marshal Service did not provide medically necessary health care services to two prisoners in its custody: Ms. Jean Marshall, 74, and Heather Idoni, 59,” House Pro-Life Caucus Co-Chairmen Chris Smith (R-NJ) and Andy Harris (R-MD) wrote to USMS Director Ronald Davis and BOP Director Colette Peters.

“We ask Director Davis to provide a clear and comprehensive account of the care provided to Ms. Idoni and Ms. Marshall during their time in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service,” the letter continued, also calling on Peters to “advise us on what actions the Bureau of Prisons has taken to ensure Ms. Marshall is receiving appropriate care.”

“We also ask for information on actions the Bureau of Prisons plans to take to provide appropriate care for Ms. Idoni if she is placed in Bureau of Prison custody,” the letter added, which was also signed by Judiciary subcommittee Reps. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Chip Roy (R-TX), Harriet Hageman (R-WY), Claudia Tenney (R-NY), and Debbie Lesko (R-AZ).

Marshall and Idoni were both convicted of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act for blockading access to an abortion clinic in Northwest Washington, D.C., in October 2020. Since August 2023, Idoni has been in the custody of the USMS, according to the lawmakers, and Marshall has been in custody since September 2023.

Marshall was sentenced to 15 additional months in prison on May 25, and Idoni is scheduled to be sentenced next week. Idoni will also be sentenced on July 30 for convictions of conspiracy and FACE Act convictions in an unrelated clinic blockade from Tennessee, according to the Justice Department.

The Republicans’ letter details a report that Idoni suffered a stroke about two weeks ago and had three stents placed above her heart. She was allegedly told to take daily doses of heart medicine, but at the time of publication on Monday, she said she had not been given a single dose.

Idoni reportedly raised her concerns with prison officials, but she said a nurse told her after six days that jail records indicated that she received her daily dose. Idoni is concerned that her medical records are being falsified and told a reporter that “she was frightened that she might die.”

Idoni is said to also suffer from diabetes, and she has said the jail has not offered her diabetes medication, leaving her without any prescription.

Marshall, on the other hand, was allegedly denied hip surgery despite struggling with the ability to walk and two emergency room visits since the time of her incarceration. Marshall said she was diagnosed with osteoarthritis in both hips and was scheduled for surgery in October 2023 but was not allowed to keep that date.

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The lawmakers gave Davis and Peters until Friday to respond.

The Washington Examiner reached out to the USMS and BOP for comment.

Biden announced that he would participate in two debates against his rival, former President Donald Trump, instead of those moderated by the Commission on Presidential Debates, including one at VSU on Oct. 1. It was meant to be the second of three presidential debates in a series that the commission chose, including two other debates in Texas and Utah. VSU would have been the first historically black university to host such an event.

“The Biden campaign is refusing to participate in a historic general election presidential debate at VSU a great university and HBCU. Joe Biden is turning his back on students, Virginians and the nation because he can’t defend his failing policies,” Youngkin wrote on X Thursday. “Huge snub to VSU and the citizens of the Commonwealth.”

Before the president announced he would not participate in the commission’s debates, his campaign chairwoman, Jen O’Malley Dillon, reportedly penned a letter listing gripes with the timing of the debates, among them noting that it was too late in the election year to hold debates. As a result, the commission issued its response at the beginning of this month.

“The CPD purposefully chose September 16 after a comprehensive study of early voting rules in every state,” it wrote in a statement. “In-person early voting in North Carolina does not begin until October 17. On September 16, the day of the first debate, Pennsylvania voters can receive, complete and return ballots at their county boards of elections. Every other state starts early voting later, as of the most recently published information.”

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However the letter also accused the CPD of being “unable or unwilling to enforce the rules,” pointing to the 2020 elections, claiming Trump broke debate rules with no consequences and wasn’t tested properly for COVID-19 before the debate, as he was positive during the event. Over 73 million viewers tuned into that debate.

The Washington Examiner reached out to the Biden campaign, the CPD, and VSU for comment.