Monday morning news: July 31, 2023

Presidential politics » Republican White House hopefuls flocked to Iowa over the weekend pitching their vision and experience to voters.

BURGUM: We will stop buying energy from our enemies. We’ll start selling it to our allies.

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum was one of roughly a dozen candidates who spoke at the 2023 Lincoln Dinner in Des Moines.

Ron DeSantis touted his leadership credentials as governor of Florida.

DESANTIS: We enacted the heartbeat bill. We have the number one economy in the country. We have eliminated critical race theory from tour K-12 schools.

Businessman Vivek Ramaswamy said his parents immigrated to the United States more than 40 years ago with almost no money.

RAMASWAMY: I went on to found multi-billion dollar companies while getting married and raising our two sons. That is the American dream.

He said he wants to preserve that dream for future generations.

Trump » Former President Donald Trump also addressed Iowa voters before moving on to campaign in Pennsylvania. He again said the 2020 election was rigged. And he suggested that other candidates now running for president should drop out of the race.

TRUMP: For ‘Ron Desanctimonious’ and so many others that are wasting hundreds of millions of dollars that Republicans should be using to build a massive vote-gathering operation.

He still has a massive lead over other GOP candidates in polls. But at the same time, Republican voters are split on Donald Trump.

In an average of polls in early voting states, roughly 47% of Republicans back the former president. But so far the other half of the party has not united behind any one alternative.

Trump charges » Meantime, Trump’s legal team is hard at work after special counsel Jack Smith added new felony charges against the former president last week.

Trump legal spokeswoman Alina Habba said Sunday:

HABBA: When he has his time in court and when we get to file our papers, you will see that every single video, every single surveillance tape that was requested was turned over.

Prosecutors allege that the former president and staffers asked an employee to erase video footage at his Mar-a-Lago resort to obstruct the Justice Department’s probe involving classified documents at Trump’s home.

U.S. mother, daughter kidnapped in Haiti » A nurse from New Hampshire who works for a nonprofit group in Haiti and has been kidnapped with her young daughter. WORLD’s Josh Schumacher has more.

JOSH SCHUMACHER: The nonprofit group El Roi Haiti says Alix Dorsainvil and her daughter were abducted on Thursday. The group runs a school and ministry in Port-au-Prince.

In a statement, the group said “Alix has worked tirelessly to bring relief to those who are suffering as she loves and serves the people of Haiti in the name of Jesus.”

The U.S. State Department says it is aware of the abduction and is “in regular contact with Haitian authorities.”

For WORLD, I’m Josh Schumacher.

Russia attack » Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that the battleground is expanding to Russian territory. His remarks came on the same day that Moscow accused Ukraine of using drones to attack targets inside Russian borders.

The Kremlin said its forces shot down the three drones with two crashing into buildings in Moscow.

Meanwhile U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken says that Washington is confident China is not supplying weapons to Russia for use against Ukraine, but others might be:

BLINKEN: We do have concerns about individual entities providing technology, dual-use technology that can be used, among other things, for drones and other kinds of weapons.

Blinken says The U.S. is looking to China for help in cracking down on those private arms suppliers.

Heat/Weather » More than 70 million Americans are under excessive heat advisories.

Temperatures are expected to hit 105 in Austin, Texas today. But one local resident said that won’t keep him from his pickleball match.

RESIDENT: Bring a towel ice just put it on your neck, you know like get some ice on it and take breaks in between each game.

Meanwhile Phoenix, Arizona has hit 30 straight days of temperatures topping 110 degrees.

Farther east, heat indexes, which factor in humidity could hit 115 across much of the south and southeast this week.

I'm Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: cases of government overreach on Legal Docket. Plus, the Monday Mondeybeat.

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