What happened
Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.), who lost to Abdul El-Sayed in the state’s Democratic Senate primary, unexpectedly endorsed Republican Mike Rogers yesterday. After telling her aides and allies she would support El-Sayed and attend a unity event yesterday morning, Stevens instead showed up at a Black church in Detroit with Rogers (pictured above). El-Sayed “said I was no longer welcome in his campaign and that I should stay away,” she said in a video. “And that’s why I am endorsing Mike Rogers.”

Who said what
Stevens’ reversal was met with “scorching backlash,” Politico said. Her longtime chief of staff and her communications director quit, she was kicked out of the Michigan Democratic Party and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) criticized her “despicable betrayal.” 

Republicans were “gleeful for much of the day” about the “embarrassing and potentially costly drama for Democrats,” The New York Times said. But El-Sayed’s campaign said it raised $1.2 million yesterday. In a “tense” interview with Anderson Cooper last night, Stevens “refused to articulate” why she had changed her mind, CNN said, and said she “absolutely” still wants Democrats to win the Senate.

What next?
The “question that could decide Michigan’s Senate race” and potentially control of the Senate is whether Stevens’ defection will “change votes,” CNN said. A New York Times/Siena poll released yesterday found El-Sayed with an 11-point lead over Rogers, with “almost no sign of remaining dissent in the Democratic ranks,” the Times said. 

What happened
A six-day localized ceasefire around the southern Ukrainian town of Oleshky expired last night, ending the longest pause in fighting since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. The estimated 2,000 residents of the Russian-held city were “offered the choice of evacuating to territory controlled by Ukraine or Russia, or remaining in the city” with replenished supplies, The Associated Press said. First lady Melania Trump, who helped broker the truce alongside Pope Leo XIV, said on social media that nearly 800 people were evacuated in the rare joint operation

Who said what
Oleshky was captured in 2022 and had been “caught in intense fighting between the two sides that left residents starving and unable to escape,” said Agence France-Presse. Many were forced to “eat weeds to survive,” said Dan Johnson at the BBC. 

The temporary truce in Olensky and surrounding areas of Kherson province “clearly demonstrates that de-escalation steps are possible when Russia is the one put in a position” where it has to act, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on social media. But elsewhere, he added, “extremely” intense Russian strikes yesterday left “hundreds of thousands of families remain without power” as Moscow is “trying to take maximum advantage of the shortage of ballistic missile interceptors.”

What next?
“Let Oleshky become the starting point for lasting peace,” Melania Trump said on social media. Ukraine’s General Staff this morning said the Russian military had “used ​the humanitarian pause to improve its positions” around the town.

Biotechnology firm Warhound wants to clone and genetically modify military dogs to be used for tasks like bomb detection, searches and policing. The company says it is working to ensure the process is humane, but some experts are concerned.

Warhound will “find top dogs that have finished training and biobank their genetic material,” said Fortune. Then, through genetic engineering, the company will “focus on eliminating common health conditions that impact these breeds,” said Wired. In the future, more advanced changes might be made, like “incorporating olfactory receptor genes from wolves.” 

“Animal welfare is central to the program,” which will “operate under the guidance of the American Humane Society,” Warhound said in a press release. “By improving health, durability and training success,” the program will reduce the number of dogs needed for missions and “enable safer, more effective” service. “We ask dogs to put their lives on the line to protect ours,” Ben Lamm, who founded the company with Palmer Luckey, said in the release. “Yet we are still relying on outdated approaches to breeding and training.”

While the “science the company proposes is possible,” it’s “prone to error, inefficiencies and a slew of ethical concerns,” said Scientific American. The process “requires a lot of dogs to have invasive things done to them and to be killed in order to produce one cloned puppy,” said Lisa Moses, a veterinarian and bioethicist at Harvard University.