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Today’s top stories

Vice President Harris will focus on grocery store prices and housing costs in the first major policy speech of her campaign later today in Raleigh, N.C. She will roll out her economic plan, focused on two issues that are top of mind for voters. This comes as the Democratic presidential nominee faces criticism for offering scant details about her own vision for the role, and as her Republican opponent Donald Trump tries to blame her for high prices.

• 🎧 NPR’s Asma Khalid tells Up First that she’s expected to expand the child tax credit and focus on cutting expenses for healthcare, housing and groceries. Harris will call for a federal ban on price gouging in the food sector. She also wants to give first-time home buyers $25,000 toward their down payment, a plan that could help around 4 million people. Khalid says the economy is one of the biggest political vulnerabilities for Harris because many voters are nostalgic for the Trump economy they remember from before COVID.

Former President Trump has been facing pressure from Republicans to focus on policy issues instead of crowd sizes and personal attacks. This week, Trump talked about the economy. Speaking at a North Carolina rally and an extensive press conference at his New Jersey golf club, Trump talked about his plan to eliminate taxes on tips and Social Security benefits for around 45 minutes. He then took questions on topics including Israel, the assassination attempt against him, jobs and Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, though he got off track and returned to the personal attacks.

• 🎧 Yesterday’s event was part of Trump’s efforts to highlight that he does answer questions while Harris has not held a news conference, NPR’s Franco Ordoñez says. While Republicans ask him to tone down his personal attacks, he said he’s the candidate, he has to campaign his own way and it’s what so many of his supporters love about him. Harris is expected to get another bump in public opinion during next week’s Democratic National Convention. Trump said his campaign’s strategy is to paint her as a radical liberal from California. He will also work hard to steal the spotlight with counterprogramming each day by holding rallies and JD Vance doing interviews.

Five people, including two California doctors and an alleged drug dealer, have been charged and arrested in connection with the death of actor Matthew Perry. Best known as Chandler Bing from Friends, Perry died last October from the acute effects of ketamine. Officials said in a press conference yesterday that a broad underground criminal network supplied him with the drugs that ultimately killed him. The “Ketamine Queen of North Hollywood,” Jasveen Sangha, and Dr. Salvador Plasencia were among the arrested. U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada said that the defendants cared more about making money off of Perry than caring for his well-being.

• 🎧 A Drug Enforcement Administration official said that while trying to get help for anxiety and depression, Perry became addicted to ketamine, LAist reporter Robert Garrova says. Doctors refused to increase his dosage and that’s when he turned to other doctors who were ready to take advantage for profit. He paid $55,000 for around 20 vials of ketamine over two months last year.

Today’s listen

Shaboozey performs during the 2024 BET Awards in Los Angeles in June 2024.

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In the race for the unofficial yet coveted “song of the summer,” Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” currently reigns supreme. It’s sitting at No. 1 for a fourth straight week on Billboard’s Hot 100 and is also the top streaming song, top-selling song and the song getting the most radio airplay. The rest of the chart, though, remained eerily static this week, but there are clues as to what bops could take the top spot before summer’s end.

Weekend picks

Check out what NPR is watching, reading and listening to this weekend:

🍿Movies: Cuckoo, a stylishly odd horror film, stars Hunter Schafer as an American teen who reluctantly moves with her family to a mysterious resort in the German Alps. Her rebellious spirit clashes with the resort’s creepy proprietor.

📚 Books: Wendell Berry’s new poetry collection, Another Day: Sabbath Poems, 2013-2023, brings to life the joys and sorrows of hard-working rural Kentuckians.

🎵 Music: Louis Cole is a prolific musician known primarily as a drummer, and whose style over the past decade has fallen in the nexus of jazz, funk and rock. Now, he’s given himself new musical challenges: Writing music for a choir and a new album of orchestral music, called nothing.

🥘 Food: Michelin-starred chef René Redzepi, host of the new show Omnivore on Apple TV+, joins Bullseye with Jesse Thorn’s I Wish I Made That segment to talk about a recipe he wishes he’d invented: a beautiful vegetable dish called Le Gargouillou.

❓Quiz: After the blissful news avalanches of campaign hijinks and the Olympics, we’re back to the usual soup of science, retail and animals. Do you think you’re up for the challenge?

3 things to know before you go

The prehistoric monument Stonehenge, near Amesbury in southern England, has long fascinated researchers and visitors.

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1. Researchers say Stonehenge’s “Altar Stone” may have come from Scotland. This means the monolith – weighing roughly 12,000 pounds – at the center of one of the world’s most mysterious was monuments somehow transported hundreds of miles to England before the invention of the wheel.
2. The Washington Post is reviewing star tech columnist Taylor Lorenz’s private story on social media, which appears to label President Joe Biden a “war criminal” in a photo. Lorenz disputes the authenticity of the photo.
3. TikTok argues that it faces “the most sweeping speech restriction” in U.S. history, in its latest court filing in its battle to avoid being banned. The Chinese-owned social media app argues that the government’s claims that it could be used for Chinese propaganda are baseless.

This newsletter was edited by Obed Manuel.

Senior editors at the Washington Post are reviewing a prominent tech columnist’s private story on social media, which appears to label President Biden a “war criminal” in a photo.

The Post’s Taylor Lorenz attended a White House event for digital influencers on Wednesday. In the photo she shared with a circle of friends on Instagram, Biden appears over her shoulder; the damning caption rests just below him, accompanied by a text frowny face.

After the New York Post’s Jon Levine — a frequent critic of hers — revealed the Instagram photo caption yesterday in a tweet, Lorenz wrote back at him: “You people will fall for any dumbass edit someone makes.”

A fact-check appended to Levine’s tweet cited her apparent denial. (The contextual note to the tweet says, “Taylor Lorenz says this is a digital manipulation which has added a false caption.”) Lorenz told her editors that someone else had added the caption to the photo.

NPR has obtained a screengrab of Lorenz’s actual post, which contained that caption. It was not shared with her wider Instagram audience of 143,000 followers.

Four people with direct knowledge of the private Instagram story confirmed its authenticity to NPR. They spoke to NPR on condition they not be identified due to the professional sensitivity of the situation for Lorenz.

“Our executive editor and senior editors take alleged violations of our standards seriously,” a spokesperson for the newspaper told NPR. “We’re aware of the alleged post and are looking into it.” Lorenz declined to comment.

Lorenz removes the picture from her private chat

About an hour after originally circulating it, Lorenz removed the picture with the “war criminal” caption from her private Instagram chat and publicly posted the same picture on social media – this time, with no such caption.

Some pro-Palestinian protesters have sought to tag Biden with the label “war criminal” for the deaths in Gaza caused by Israel, an American ally. The context of Lorenz’s posting, however, is not entirely clear; the phrasing and images — including a frowny face made with a colon and open parenthesis 🙁 — closely tracks an online meme.

Lorenz has since told associates that a close friend took her posted picture and superimposed the caption upon it, as a joke, and that she shared it with the group on the private Instagram posting.

Lorenz has not been otherwise vocal about the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Lorenz covers digital culture for the Post and is herself fully immersed in it. She has won mass acclaim, showing up on “best of” lists. Her book Extremely Online was a national bestseller last year.

She previously wrote for the Daily Beast, Business Insider, the Atlantic magazine and then The New York Times.

Controversy in real life and online

Lorenz has also courted controversy, online, in print, and in real life.

During the peak of the pandemic, and since its ebb, she has inspired mockery from conservatives over her insistence on wearing masks, even outdoors. She has cited autoimmune issues as the reason.

On leaving the Times two years ago, Lorenz told Vanity Fair that she had hoped that paper would “evolve in their ways” in regard to digital culture and social media.

Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger and Executive Editor Joseph Kahn have called for an emphasis on journalistic independence and have urged staffers to shun online posting with ideological leanings or snark.

Though Lorenz writes many news articles, the Post has designated her a columnist, giving her more leeway in print and online.

Yet the Post itself has a tradition of reining in its journalists’ public social media remarks. In 2022, the Post fired reporter Felicia Sonmez for insubordination over her tweets about treatment of female journalists and suspended reporter Dave Weigel for relaying a joke seen as sexist. He left the paper several months later.