THE COCONUT TREE: Vice President Hamala Harris over the weekend vetted candidates to be her running mate while enduring pressure from donors, interest groups, and political rivals for her to pick their favorite.

She is expected to announce her pick tomorrow. 

  Harris met with Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, and Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania. Progressives have said both Kelly and Shapiro are too conservative on some key issues. 

  One concern about Shapiro is that he’s Jewish and could depress the vote among liberals standing up for Palestinians in Israel’s war on Gaza. The Democrats never make it easy for themselves.

THE WAR ROOM: American made F16 jets have begun to arrive in Ukraine in what President Volodymyr Zelensky hope will be a turning point in control of the air over his country. Right now, the Russians rule the air.

  Zelensky admitted though that, “So far, the number that is available in Ukraine and the number of pilots who have already been trained is not enough.”

  On the waters, Ukraine has done an amazing job damaging and intimidating Russia’s Black Sea naval fleet. The Ukrainians have been using missiles and seaborne drones, remote control explosive-laden speedboats.

  Ukraine is reported last Friday to have destroyed Russia’s Rostov-on-Don submarine in the southern Crimean port city of Sevastopol. The sub had already been reported damaged by an attack while it was under repair in drydock, but this time it sank at its pier.

THE BEAR TRUTH: Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., admitted yesterday in advance of an article to be published in The New Yorker that in 2014 he had left a dead bear cub in Manhattan’s Central Park because he thought it would be “amusing.”

  Kennedy posted a video telling the story on social media. “Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one,” he said, tagging the magazine.

  By his telling to actress Roseanne Barr in the video, Kennedy says that he was driving through the Hudson Valley when he saw a woman in a van hit and kill the bear cub. “I pulled over and I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van because I was going to skin the bear,” he says. “It was very good condition and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator.”

  Kennedy then tells how that night he went to dinner at the expensive Peter Luger Steak House in New York City and then had to catch a plane. He decided to leave the bear in Central Park with an old bicycle on top of it to make it look like it had been hit by the bicycle. After the bear was found, authorities said the cause of death was consistent with being hit by a car.

 In one of those ironies of celebrity life, Tatiana Schlossberg, a reporter for the NY Times at that time, and the daughter of Kennedy’s first cousin Caroline Kennedy, wrote about the incident. 

  Kennedy’s explanation to Roseanne Barr for what he did was. “This was a little bit of the redneck in me.”

FIVE RINGS: Fantastic US Gymnast Simone Biles won her seventh Olympic gold medal of her career in the all-around competition over the weekend. She also has a gold medal smile.

  Biles, however, fell off the balance beam today to finish fifth in that event.

  American women swimmers broke the world record in the 4-by-100 meter medley relay to win gold in that event.

  And, American Noah Lyles won the gold by five thousandths of a second over Jamaica’s Kishane Thompson in the 100-meter sprint. He’s now the world’s fastest human.

THE OBIT PAGE: Ina Jaffe, A familiar voice of straight and sometimes hard-nosed reporting on National Public Radio for 40 years, died last week of breast cancer in Los Angeles.  She had been the first editor of the network’s first version of the weekly national news show “Weekend Edition Saturday” and for many years contributed to the afternoon news program “All Things Considered.”

THE SPIN RACK: Hurricane Debby hit Florida as a Category 1 storm this morning. —Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has resigned after 15 years in power following violent antigovernment protests in which close to 300 people have died. The head of the military says he will form an interim government and stand down when the situation has stabilized. — A five-year-old boy was killed and another child injured when an inflatable bounce house went airborne during a high wind in Maryland Friday night. — Alma Cooper, a US Army officer, was named Miss USA yesterday, becoming the third person to hold the title this year following the sudden resignation of the 2023 winner. — California’s Park Fire has grown to 400,000 acres and is the 4^th largest in California history.

BELOW THE FOLD: A Catholic priest in Austria was busted for operating a methamphetamine lab in his parish rectory. But say this for him … he wasn’t molesting children.

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