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For all the political theater at the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump’s main foreign-policy message was that he’s a peacemaker. That’s of particular interest to Vladimir Putin.

The Kremlin isn’t hiding its satisfaction at the prospect of Trump and his running-mate, JD Vance, winning November’s presidential election on a platform that includes a pledge to end the war in Ukraine quickly. Russia’s foreign minister this week said Vance’s stated opposition to further aid for Ukraine was “what we need.”

Ukraine fears Trump may force it to make territorial concessions to Putin or face Russia’s army without US backing. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy challenged Trump in a Bloomberg interview this month to explain how he’d end the war, and they may speak by phone today.

Russia’s military is largely bogged down in Ukraine after incurring huge losses. By digging in for another four months, Putin now knows American voters may help him deliver the victory he failed to achieve on the battlefield.

And there’s a potentially even greater prize on the horizon.

The Russian president has started arguing for a new security architecture embracing Europe and Asia to replace the “outdated” US-led world order, with a central role for Russia.

The Kremlin may hope the offer of a grand bargain to reshape global security will appeal to Trump, a famously transactional dealmaker.

Europeans are already fearful he’ll leave them exposed to Russia by pulling the US out of the NATO military alliance.

In his convention speech yesterday, Trump said the planet is “teetering on the edge of World War III.” He declared he’d “end every single international crisis that the current administration has created” including the war in Ukraine.

It was Putin who started the war in February 2022.

The question for the Russian leader is what a peacemaking Trump may now offer him to end it.

Global Must Reads

Trump used his 93-minute speech accepting the Republican nomination for president to fire off insults at his usual targets: immigrants, Democrats and the media. Basking in total control of the party, he vowed to reverse President Joe Biden’s policies to promote electric vehicles and criticized what he said was trillions of dollars of wasteful spending “having to do with the green new scam.” He also recounted to thousands of rapt supporters his narrow escape from a would-be assassin’s bullet.

The pressure on Biden to quit his reelection bid keeps building. While his surrogates insisted that he was “not wavering” on running, even some of his cabinet ministers discussed among themselves whether he should step aside due to his health and doubts over his ability to defeat Trump in November. The harshest blow was a report in the Washington Post that former President Barack Obama told allies the pathway to victory for Biden, who is isolating at home due to Covid-19, was greatly diminished.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves warned “difficult decisions” lie ahead as she tries to fix the UK’s public finances, raising the prospect of tax hikes or spending cuts in her maiden budget. Reeves, Britain’s first female finance minister, told Bloomberg in her first TV interview since the Labour Party’s landslide election victory that she would be honest about the scale of the challenges ahead.

A wave of arrests kicked off Tunisia’s election season with the targeting of rivals and critics of President Kais Saied, stirring fears of a barely contested presidential vote on Oct. 6 that would deal a hammer blow to what was once the Arab world’s most progressive democracy. In a matter of days, three prominent aspiring candidates have faced police action in a crackdown that’s also swept up members of the largest remaining opposition party.

French President Emmanuel Macron scored a political victory when lawmakers reelected a centrist candidate from his party to a second term leading the National Assembly. Yael Braun-Pivet of Macron’s pro-business Renaissance party won the vote for parliamentary president by 13 ballots, with the support of centrist and center-right lawmakers from outside his alliance.

Computer systems failed across the globe today, taking down services at airlines, banks and the London Stock Exchange after a widely used cybersecurity program crashed and Microsoft separately reported problems with its cloud services.

One man was killed in the heart of Israel’s commercial capital Tel Aviv today by an explosion from a suspected drone, with Yemen’s Houthi militants claiming responsibility.

Russian prosecutors have asked a court to hand down an 18-year sentence in a penal colony on espionage charges for Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, the Interfax news service reported.

Bangladesh was hit by a nationwide internet shutdown as students armed with sticks and stones clashed with police in protests against the government’s job quota policy that reports said have left at least 39 people dead.

Washington Dispatch

The moment that markets and economists as well as people seeking mortgages and lower credit-card charges have long anticipated may finally be at hand. The US Federal Reserve, after more than two years of a laser focus on inflation, may be prepared to cut interest rates in September.

The central bankers have expressed increasing confidence that price stability is within sight, while risks to the labor market have grown. They’ve laid the groundwork for the coming decision in speeches over recent weeks, and Chair Jerome Powell will likely offer more specifics after a policy meeting on July 30-31.

It’s not quite a sure thing. Fed officials still want to see monthly price numbers continuing to trend down toward their 2% annual inflation goal before they commit to lowering borrowing costs from a two-decade high. Yet Powell and his colleagues are also determined not to squander the chance of a so-called soft landing for the American economy, which is showing at least a few signs of losing momentum.

One person to watch today: Raphael Bostic, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, will speak at a conference.

Sign up for the Washington Edition newsletter for more from the US capital and watch Balance of Power at 1 and 5 p.m. ET weekdays on Bloomberg Television.

Chart of the Day

At the current pace, public fast-charging sites for electric vehicles will outnumber gas stations in the US in about eight years, and the momentum is expected to accelerate. North American operators will spend a collective $6.1 billion on the necessary infrastructure this year, nearly double their 2023 investment, according to BloombergNEF estimates. The annual outlay is expected to double again by 2030.

And Finally

While the vast majority of the world supports a two-state solution to solve the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, the Knesset rejected the establishment of an independent Palestinian state at a sitting yesterday in Jerusalem. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is due to visit Washington next week where the Biden administration is expected to urge him to accept a nation for Palestinians as the way to bring Arab states into the rebuilding of Gaza and normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Pop quiz (no cheating!) Which former French president never kept his promise to swim in the Seine to show how clean it was? Send your answers to balancepower@bloomberg.net.

More from Bloomberg

NEW YORK (AP) — An 89-year-old comedian is recovering after being randomly punched and knocked to the ground while waiting to cross a street in New York earlier this month.

D’yan Forest said she had just stopped at a coffee shop and was heading to a swimming pool when someone came up to her from behind and hit her in the eye. She lay on the ground in shock as police and paramedics came to her aid.

“I thought I had lost use of the eye because I couldn’t see anything.” Forest said. Her eyesight returned over the next four hours while she underwent tests at a hospital.

Police on Saturday said the female suspect in the July 10 incident had a medium complexion and cornrow braids and was last seen wearing a tank top and shorts with a Jurassic Park logo.

Forest said she has lived in Greenwich Village since 1966 and had never had anything else bad happen to her aside from watching the 9/11 attacks from her roof.

“I walk around the village now and I don’t go near anybody. I don’t want to be near anybody,” she said.

Forest holds the Guinness World Record for being the oldest working female comedian. She said her first thought after falling to the ground was whether she would be presentable for her July 29 nightclub show.

But she said her eye is healing.

“My eye was totally red and horrible. But now at least I can go on stage without a black eye,” Forest said.

BROOKLYN, N.Y. (PIX11) – We’re learning new disturbing details about a horrific quadruple homicide in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.

Four members of the same family, including two young children, have died. A family member is now in custody.

Police say they were called to an apartment at the corner of West 8th and Avenue P around 10:30 p.m. Friday night about an assault that was in progress.

Sources say a man came home to find his wife, two young children, and his mother inside the apartment, all suffering from stab wounds.

They were all pronounced dead at the scene.

Police then arrested the man’s 24-year-old brother. 

A woman named Guzal lives in the building and says she knew one of the women. “She always helped me when I came ten years before, and she was always helpful.”

Neighbors say the family was originally from Uzbekistan and had lived in the building for years. 

Jennifer Ponti was still reeling after seeing officers remove body bags from the apartment.

Ponti said, “It’s sad. It’s horrible. Babies shouldn’t die no matter what.”

Detectives believe the stabbings took place due to a domestic dispute. 

The 24-year-old man is now a person of interest in the deaths of his own mother, sister-in-law, niece, and nephew.

He was taken into custody for questioning. 

One neighbor says after the stabbings, a large crowd gathered to console the family outside.

Juan Perez said, “There were multiple men sobbing and crying inconsolably and multiple men trying to console and just cries.”

“It’s heartbreaking to hear this. They didn’t deserve this.” 

The victims have been identified as 56-year-old Fayzieva Mavlyuda, 27-year-old Maftuna Khakimova, 5-year-old Kamila Shavkatova, and 4-year-old Timur Shavkatov.

Police have not released the identity of the 24-year-old person of interest. 

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Friday spoke by phone with his Russian counterpart for the second time in less than a month and one day after the NATO summit wrapped up in Washington with a focus on countering Moscow, according to the Pentagon.

During the call with Russian Minister of Defense Andrey Belousov, which was initiated by Moscow, Austin “emphasized the importance of maintaining lines of communication amid Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine,” deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters.

Austin last spoke with Belousov on June 25, about 2.5 weeks earlier. Prior to that, the Pentagon chief had not directly spoken with his Russian counterpart since March 2023. Communications between Washington and Moscow have almost entirely broken down since Kremlin forces invaded Ukraine in February 2022. 

But Russia appears to be roiled following the NATO Summit, during which alliance members issued a joint communique laying out new military and financial support for Ukraine and pledged their support for an “irreversible path” to future membership for the embattled country. 

What’s more, NATO has backed Ukraine’s push for more latitude in its use of Western-supplied weapons to strike inside Russia, with the United Kingdom announcing it would allow Kyiv to hit targets over Russian borders with British-provided long-range missiles.

In addition, the U.S. and Germany on Wednesday announced the movement of more strategic weapons into Europe, including long-range fires such as undeveloped hypersonic missile systems, starting in 2026.

Moscow, which has long viewed the expansion of NATO as a national security threat, said it would retaliate against the U.S. missile deployment plans.

“NATO once again very clearly confirmed its essence. It is an alliance founded in an era of confrontation with the aim of continuing confrontation,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday during a press conference with Russian news agencies.

“We see in fact that the alliance’s military infrastructure is constantly and gradually moving towards our borders. … All of this will require us to take thoughtful, coordinated and effective responses to deter and confront the alliance.”

Adding to tensions, reports emerged this week that U.S. and German intelligence had foiled a Russian assassination plot against the CEO of a German manufacturing company sending munitions to Ukraine. 

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has since said allies are increasing intelligence sharing to combat such Russian attacks.

Asked whether the Pentagon has any intelligence corroborating the Russian assassination scheme, or if Austin brought up the foiled plot with Belousov, Singh declined to provide further details.

“Of course we always, with any of our allies and partners, always share intelligence and information, but I just don’t have more to add,” she said.

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The four hostages who were rescued on Saturday from Gaza are in a worse physical and psychological state than initially believed, according to Hebrew media reports on Sunday.

Noa Argamani, Shlomi Ziv, Almog Meir Jan, and Andrey Kozlov were found to be malnourished during initial medical tests at Sheba Medical Center on Saturday, but the mental influence of their captivity had yet to be established.

The Kan public broadcaster reported Sunday evening that after initial conversations with the four, medical professionals believed they were exhibiting signs of Stockholm syndrome, as the rescued hostages spoke about awful experiences they had been subjected to in captivity while also saying that their captors cared about their wellbeing.

Jan said that as a “cynical” gesture, his captors made him a cake for his birthday.

Staff at the hospital told the media that the four rescued hostages did not sleep on Saturday night, their first night back in Israel after their resuce, and instead stayed up talking to their families and among themselves.

The doctors also told Kan that the four were constantly seeking each other out, indicating their continued need to lean on each other for support.

The rescued hostages have begun to talk about their experiences, according to various reports.

Channel 13 reported on Sunday that Ziv said he had learned Arabic from Al-Jazeera broadcasts he watched in captivity and that their captors made them read the Quran and pray every day.

Argamani has also begun to share some of what she went through, telling her family that she narrowly avoided death four times in captivity, according to Channel 12 news.

According to a Monday Ynet report, Argamani learned Arabic while she was in captivity and used it to become a spokesperson for other female hostages she was held with before they were released in November during a weeklong truce. Before they were separated, Argamani would use the Arabic she learned to get things the hostages needed for them.

She said she had been held in four different apartments during her eight months in captivity and that in the last location, the family made her wash their dishes. Ynet reported that she also cooked at times with basic ingredients she was provided with.

Describing the rescue on Saturday, Argamani said she was washing the dishes when she heard a shout from the living room and saw people with their faces covered who told her they were from the IDF.

“At first, I thought they were making fun of me, and I didn’t move, but then he asked me, ‘Can I throw you over my shoulder?’ and I realized what was happening,” Channel 12 quoted her as saying.

She added that on the way to the extraction spot, their truck broke down.

“It was scary. The soldiers were brave. In a matter of one second, I may not have been here today,” she said.

Argamani was taken to see her mother, Liora, who is suffering from terminal cancer, but her father, Yaakov, said that Liora’s advanced illness made communication between the two difficult.

“I believe she understood what was happening. There was a foggy response, but Liora is in a bad way, and she barely looked at Noa,” Yaakov said.

Doctors at Ichilov Hospital, where Liora is a patient, told Ynet that Noa has become actively involved in her mother’s treatment since her return, seeking extensive information from the medical team and asking questions.

Shortly after Noa was taken captive, Liora appealed to Hamas to let her daughter go so that she could see her before she died.

Kozlov also reunited with his family on Sunday after his parents landed from St. Petersburg. In a video of the reunion, he could be seen falling to his knees and bursting into tears as soon as he saw his mother.

Argamani, Jan, Kozlov and Ziv were abducted from the Supernova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im on the morning of October 7, when 3,000 Hamas-led terrorists killed some 1,200 people and took 251 hostages in a murderous rampage across  southern Israel.

Officers of the police’s elite Yamam counter-terrorism unit, along with Shin Bet agents, on Saturday morning simultaneously raided two multi-story buildings in the heart of Nuseirat, where the four hostages were being held by Hamas-affiliated families and guards of the terror group, according to the military.

Hamas’s government media office claimed at least 274 people were killed amid the operation, an unverified figure that also does not differentiate between combatants and civilians.

The IDF acknowledged that it killed Palestinian civilians amid the fighting, but it placed the blame on Hamas for holding hostages and fighting in a dense civilian environment. “We know about under 100 [Palestinian] casualties. I don’t know how many of them are terrorists,” IDF Spokesman Daniel Hagari said on Saturday.

When COVID-19 hit in 2020, I jotted down a makeshift “will” for my four kids under 12. It wasn’t official, just a set of instructions for my children and other immediate family members in case anything happened to me. Bank accounts, passwords, and access to other valuable information the family might need were included.

It was the beginning of the pandemic and we had no idea just how serious things would get.

As a single parent, I worried that if I suddenly caught it and died, my children would languish. The virus was rampant, and the risk of dying seemed high and very real. Fear and anxiety took hold.

COVID-19 deaths weren’t exactly uncommon. The pandemic killed more than a million Americans, and there have been about 104 million confirmed cases in the United States alone. A lot of decisions were rooted in fear and brought with them life-changing consequences. Statewide lockdowns, shuttered businesses, school closings: All were based initially on the social distancing rule of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

We’re now getting answers to questions those decisions raised.

In his testimony to the House Oversight and Accountability Committee on Monday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and former chief medical adviser to President Donald Trump, said the 6-foot social distancing rule, which the CDC originally recommended, had not been backed by a clinical trial. This is despite constant claims that COVID-19 protocols were based on science.

These disclosures are damning and maddening for all of us who had structured our lives around these rules for years. As a result, millions of people suffered needlessly.

In testimony, Fauci admits COVID rules weren’t based on science

On Monday, Fauci was also asked to clarify his comments during the two-day congressional testimony he gave in January. The transcript of that testimony was recently released.

He specifically responded on Monday to questions about the 6-foot rule: “It had little to do with me since I didn’t make the recommendation and my saying ‘there was no science behind it’ meant there was no clinical trial behind that.”

In January, Fauci told staff and members of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic that “there was no science behind” the 6-foot social distancing rule that state and local governments repeated for months if not years.

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“You know, I don’t recall. It sort of just appeared. I don’t recall, like, a discussion of whether it should be 5 or 6 or whatever,” Fauci said in January’s testimony.

He also admitted in the January interview that there was little science that backed requiring children to wear masks in public and at schools for almost two years.

“Do you recall reviewing any studies or data supporting masking for children?” a staffer asked Fauci.

“You know, I might have,” he answered, “but I don’t recall specifically that I did. I might have.”

These revelations are infuriating. Fauci repeated CDC-based COVID-19 protocols as the mouthpiece of President Trump’s administration. Desperate for guidance, states, local governments, businesses, churches and schools instituted them.

Closing schools because of COVID guidelines hurt kids

The real effect of social distancing − which Fauci basically admitted Monday and in January’s testimony was just an educated guess on how to deter COVID-19 − devastated America’s economy, small businesses and families. It interrupted the fabric of American life. For what?

The CDC’s now-infamous three weeks to “flatten the curve” turned into months for students and families living with the consequences. Here are some.

Closing schools was devastating to kids, especially poor or otherwise disadvantaged children. Remote learning wasn’t as effective as in-person learning, especially in the first year, as teachers had no time to prepare. Kids fell behind their grade levels. Pandemic closings resulted in two decades of learning loss.

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Anxiety and depression skyrocketed, especially among adolescents and teens. Kids with learning disabilities were completely left behind.

Non-urgent but still important medical diagnoses and exams were halted altogether. (This went for adults, too.) When schools did reconvene, masks were treated as sacrosanct, and kids were forced to eat lunch several feet apart.

Children learning to read and write at the beginning of the pandemic are still behind even now. Never mind that kids rarely showed any adverse effects of COVID-19, let alone died from it.

This is not a matter of hindsight being 20/20, either. People, including myself, were calling for schools to open in the fall months after the pandemic began, predicting it would continue to be harmful.

The entire medical profession, well beyond Fauci’s purview, seemed to struggle to understand how to mitigate the virus while continuing to provide medical care to those in need. While most providers pushed everyone to get vaccinated, screenings and routine care were pushed off for fear of COVID-19, even though they themselves were vaccinated.

At one point during the first year of COVID-19, one of my daughters became extremely ill. I phoned our pediatrician. Even though the staff was vaccinated, they would only see newborns. Her pediatrician refused to examine my daughter in person, and we tested negative for COVID-19 three times. She lost weight and refused to eat, sleeping all day.

After about 10 days, she eventually recovered. We still have no idea what illness she had, but her pediatrician’s treatment, based on COVID-19 guidelines, made no sense.

Hundreds of providers endangered patients based on ideas that had no basis in research. We’re only now learning just how much delaying cancer treatments out of the fear of spreading COVID-19 will cost people.

We cannot forget what we learned during the pandemic

Schools were just one example. The economic data, representing millions of families, is no more comforting.

In the second quarter of 2020, 1.2 million jobs were destroyed. In June 2021, 6.2 million people did not work at all or worked fewer hours because their employers closed or lost business. Family-owned businesses were lost, savings wiped, all for rules that had no real scientific basis.

Elderly loved ones, the most susceptible to COVID-19, died alone in hospital beds, with no one holding their hands and whispering last prayers. If funerals were held at all, expressions of affection was banned.

On Monday, Fauci did concede that some COVID-19 preventative measures may have gone too far and led to harmful outcomes. He said it is “very, very clear” that public health officials in the future should consider “the potential collateral negative effects” of controversial ideas like requiring masks and ask “how we can do better next time.”

Still, even this seems too little too late.

While COVID-19 measures were set in place immediately, as hundreds, if not thousands, were at risk of dying from the disease, it became clear within months that the disease disproportionately targeted elderly people and hardly affected kids at all.

An adaptable administration led by Fauci, the CDC and the National Institutes of Health would have observed such shifts and lifted strict lockdowns of schools and businesses. A healthy society quarantines the sick, not the young. A robust economy never shuts down its economy and hopes it will thrive.

Because we live in Texas, which remained largely open save for a couple of months, my kids and I watched as friends and family struggled through the pandemic with shuttered businesses and schools. The contrast between living in a state where responsible freedom was encouraged compared with places where local governments kept businesses and schools closed was obvious and remains cemented in my mind.

COVID-19 was four years ago now, but as time marches on, we must never forget its valuable lessons so we don’t repeat those mistakes again.

Nicole Russell is an opinion columnist with USA TODAY. She lives in Texas with her four kids.